I built a $5 chat app with Pocketbase & Svelte. Will it scale?

Learn how build a fullstack realtime chat app with Svelte and Pocketbase, then deploy it to a Linux server for just $5. Let's find out if the Spock stack can scale...

#webdevelopment #project #linux

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🔖 Topics Covered

- Build an app with Svelte
- What is Pocketbase?
- Can Pocketbase scale?
- Deploying Pocketbase to Linode

[ggeorgievdev]

Hi, PocketBase author here.

@fireship did a great job with the video and managed to present a lot of things (Linode, Svelte, PB) in a very compact and easy to understand format.

After reading some of the comments, I'll leave just couple notes:

1. At the moment of writing, the chat app seems to be using an older PocketBase v0.8.0 version. The latest v0.10+ releases come with split db pool and significant performance and memory improvements.

2. The realtime connections can quickly exhaust the max open files limit and you may want to increase it accordingly to the expected concurrent load (from the systemd in the video is around ~4096).

3. For those commenting that SQLite doesn't scale well - *it is PocketBase fault* that the chat app doesn't perform well on high concurrent load and further improvements will be done in the near future. For a single server setup, plain SQLite in WAL mode almost always will outperform other traditional databases.

(ps. this is a second attempt to post the comment since the first one probably got flagged because of the github link).

[leviathan]

scp is one of my favorite examples of early unix simplicity. It is basically just a script that opens an ssh connection and then pipes the data through and calls "cp" on the other side 😂

[andymc]

Was amazing how much traffic the demo app got. And it was fun to watch all the exploit attempts in real-time. Would love to see this turned into a series where we continue to strengthen, and stress test the app.

[khaledsanny]

crazy !!! a complete production web app, fully stacked ... amazing FS ... I really like the real production approach...because we often dont have this in tutorials... thanks

[vojtastruhar]

I watched this video so many times. It's a complete tutorial. From the front to the back. We've reached tutorial perfection. Thank you sir

[kalelsoffspring]

As a dev who avoids nearly every third party library if I can just write it myself, it's pretty wild seeing how easy these are to use lol Maybe I should start using

[michaelaboah]

Small svelte note that may save some trouble. At 12:35 Jeff is using the assignment “=“ operator. Svelte’s reactivity doesn’t work with state changes using methods. Hence array.push() and other methods won’t react. Use the es6 spread syntax as shown in 12:35.

Another helpful Svelte tip, if you need an element to re-render based off a change in value check out the {#key} block.

[OldKing]

Pocketbase looks really cool. I always liked paradigms where the API is closer to the database where you can self host (don't tell Theo). If I wasn't firmly planted with FastAPI + Redis/PostgreSQL; I'd start all over with Pocketbase.

[kiranraaj]

No way, NO WAYYY, I was building my web side project and going through different frameworks, i was considering svelte for frontend and i was not sure of a backend service so i searched and came across your pocketbase video, so my next step was obviously to search "svelte and pocketbase" AND GUESS WHAT, YOU UPLOAD A VIDEO ABOUT IT!????

[nulcow]

As a web developer who pretty much exclusively uses vanilla HTML/CSS/JS for frontend and PHP/PostgreSQL for backend hosted on a local apache web server, this stuff is completely new to me, but it definitely seems like a much simpler way of creating web apps.

[RS-]

You make some complex things quite simple by making content concise to the point otherwise I need to go through whole documentation or big video. Great Work❤

[DarkVader]

As someone that started to code recently and varely understands vanilla Javascript, one quarter of my mind can follow what this guy is doing and the rest 3/4 is blown by the knowledge and makes me feel like a monkey eating dirt. Wonder if i'll ever be this good. Amazing channel and content!

[lucasj.pereira]

I like how the hosted app is on fire right now! Literally...

[Smile]

as of 15 minutes after the video was posted, the chat doesn't register emojis anymore, so i guess it didn't scale 🤣🤣

[dreamisover]

This video has such a high value! I feel like learning the steps to write this individually would take days possibly if you'd do it yourself

[hallelshmueli]

Crazy how I just started to built a Pocketbase and Svelte app and this releases

[ChrisPepper]

As a C# / Microsoft Stack developer, I do often default to "What can i put together quickly in Azure" and it is increasingly painless these days to set up "something quick" (Blazor + VSCode deploy is ace). However I'm increasingly tempted by baas. Just having authentication and a database out of the box is very tempting. And Blazor is nice but it has a lot of "magic" that svelte seems to not carry as extra weight....

[zookaroo]

Damn the chat gets bombed immediately once the video released

[whkoh]

Loving the Svelte and Pocketbase videos. Thanks a million!!

[cloudfumes]

Nice tutorial pls create more on pocket base and svelte..