litestack VS AppSignal

There has been a lot of conversation about using SQLite as a production database for websites for the past few years, espeically in the Rails community with Litestack. And now, in the latest version of Rails, SQLite has become the defacto backend for many parts of the stack.

Are you confusing it with Litestream, the backup solution? https://litestream.io

What they meant was https://github.com/oldmoe/litestack which has a lot of things built on top of sqlite, like job queue and caches. Rails 8 now comes with most of them out of the box.

My SaaS ran on litestack until rails 8 came out, then I switched without problems.

Github URL: https://github.com/oldmoe/litestack

Wow! The performance benchmarks against redis are very interesting.

https://github.com/oldmoe/litestack/blob/master/BENCHMARKS.m...

Anyone who is looking at using SQLIte + Rails should check out the work done by Oldmoe (X/Github) on his Litestack project.

Here's the intro paragraph: "Litestack is a Ruby gem that provides both Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications an all-in-one solution for web application data infrastructure. It exploits the power and embeddedness of SQLite to deliver a full-fledged SQL database, a fast cache , a robust job queue, a reliable message broker, a full text search engine and a metrics platform all in a single package."

I'm currently using it on a project and can't say enough good things about it!

https://github.com/oldmoe/litestack

Ruby on Rails, Pay Gem for Payments, Devise for Login/Registration (Auth), a StaticPages controller for Landing/Product pages.

I would then use the Litestack gem: https://github.com/oldmoe/litestack + SQLite to get your DB/Cache/Job Queue working, deploy with Kamal, behind Cloudflare on a $5 Hetzner VM.

I go from idea to live app in an afternoon with this stack. I haven't gotten around to it yet, but moving all my apps to essentially free analytics dashboard/visibility with https://github.com/benvinegar/counterscale, Free APM with ScoutAPM.

If anything is ever successful, scaling is super easy. Pay for a beefier Hetzner instance, and/or start to move your DB/Cache/Job Queue off of the litestack defaults with a single LOC. Move to AWS services because those are web scale or something.

I've yet to find a better stack for the vast majority of use cases.

The benchmarks for LiteCache are impressive, with a small caveat. While LiteCache outperforms a local Redis installation for every read operation, it seems like there's still room for improvement, especially for large write payloads.

Luckily, the official LiteStack benchmarks include measurements for LiteCable against Redis, which I am going to quote here.

Let's quickly look into how LiteJob uses SQLite to implement a job queueing system. In essence, the class Litequeue interfaces with the SQLite queue table. This table's columns, like id, name, fire_at, value, and created_at, store and manage job details.

Application Performance Monitoring tools (APMs) like AppSignal for Ruby are essential for monitoring and maintaining our site's performance. They provide comprehensive insights not just at the database layer, but across the rest of the stack, allowing us to pinpoint specific areas (pages, endpoints, and even specific queries) that are causing headaches. With a good APM tool, we can track the performance of any request over various timescales, monitor background jobs, spot memory leaks, set up custom error and performance alerts, and more.

This exemplifies the compromise you might make between the probability that a new product is added, changed, or removed in the course of 15 minutes and somebody seeing a stale response. Every application will have its own limitations here, but it's a good idea to have application monitoring like AppSignal for Ruby built into your production environment. This will enable you to query how often an endpoint is accessed by the same user vs the data manipulation frequency.

Now add the AppSignal gem to the Rails app. This nifty gem will collect errors, exceptions, and relevant performance data, and port it over to AppSignal for analysis.

Continuous monitoring of your app's WebSocket performance metrics using tools like AppSignal is your friend here. Reusing the ActionCable consumer on the client side is also advisable, as it will prevent wasting Pub/Sub connections.

Once you've successfully deployed your Sinatra app, you can easily use Appsignal's Ruby APM service. AppSignal offers an integration for Rails and Rack-based apps like Sinatra.

APM tools like AppSignal also provide a convenient dashboard to monitor all your outgoing ActionMailers and keep an eye on deliverability.

Finding information in logs is a painful activity. Developers often blame themselves for not including more information about errors or how to search and filter. If you are not using any monitoring tools that provide this, including meaningful data could save you in the foreseeable future.

It can be tricky to keep an eye on the performance of your database without any other tools. Using AppSignal, you can easily track how your databases perform. See our AppSignal for Ruby page for more information.

The most important consideration with scalability is to identify bottlenecks in an application before we can act on them. A good performance monitoring tool can help. If you need one, check out AppSignal for Ruby.

Read more about AppSignal for Ruby.