This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/selfhosted by /u/No_Paramedic_4881 on 2025-02-04 11:58:48+00:00.
Hey r/selfhosted! Remember the M1 Mac Mini side project post from a couple months ago? It got hammered by traffic and somehow survived. I’ve since made a bunch of improvements—like actually adding monitoring and caching—so here’s a quick rundown of what went right, what almost went disastrously wrong, and how I'm still self-hosting it all without breaking the bank. I’ll do my best to respond in an AMA style to any questions you may have (but responses might be a bit delayed).
Here's the prior r/selfhosted post for reference:
What I Learned the Hard Way
The “Lucky” Performance
During the initial wave of traffic, the server stayed up mostly because the app was still small and required minimal CPU cycles. In hindsight, there was no caching in place, it was only running on a single CPU core, and I got by on pure luck. Once I realized how close it came to failing under a heavier load, I focused on performance fixes and 3rd party API protection measures.
Avoiding Surprise API Bills
The number of new visitors nearly pushed me past the free tier limits of some third-party services I was using. I was very close to blowing through the free tier on the Google Maps API, so I added authentication gates around costly API's and made those calls optional. Turns out free tiers can get expensive fast when an app unexpectedly goes viral. Until I was able to add authentication, I was really worried about scenarios like some random TikTok influencer sharing the app and getting served a multi-thousand dollar API bill from Google 😅.
Flying Blind With No Monitoring
My "monitoring" at that time was tailing nginx logs. I had no real-time view of how the server was handling traffic. No basic analytics, very thin logging—just crossing my fingers and hoping it wouldn’t die. When I previously shared about he app here, I had literally just finished the proof-of-concept and didnt expect much traffic to hit it for months. I've since changed that with a self-hosted monitoring stack that shows me resource usage, logs, and traffic patterns all in one place.
Environment Overhaul
I rebuilt a ton of things about the application to better scale. If you're curious, here's a high level overview of how everything works, complete with schematics and plenty of GIFs:
MacOS to Linux
The M1 Mac Mini is now running Linux natively, which freed up more system resources (nearly 2x'd the available RAM) and alleviated overhead from macOS abstractions. Docker containers build and run faster. It’s still the same hardware, but it feels like a new machine and has a lot more head room to play around with. The additional resources that were freed up allowed me to standup a more complete monitoring stack, and deploy more instances of the app within the M1 to fully leverage all CPU cores.
Zero Trust Tunnels & Better Security
I had been exposing the server using CloudFlare dynamic DNS and a basic reverse proxy. It worked, but it also made me a target for port scanners and malicious visitors outside of the protections of Cloudflare. Now the server is exposed via a zero trust tunnel plus I setup the free-tier Cloudflare WAF (web application firewall), which cut down on junk traffic by around 95%.
Performance Benchmarks
Then
Before all these optimizations, I had no idea what the server could handle. My best guess was around 400 QPS based on some very basic load testing, but I’m not sure how close I got to that during the actual viral spike due to the lack of monitoring infrastructure.
Now
After switching to Linux, improving caching, and scaling out frontends/backends, I can comfortably reach >1700 QPS in K6 load tests. That’s a huge jump, especially on a single M1 box. Caching, container optimizations, horizontal scaling to leverage all available CPU cores, and a leaner environment all helped.
Pitfalls & Challenges
Lack of Observability
Without metrics, logs, or alerts, I kept hoping the server wouldn’t explode. Now I have Grafana for dashboards, Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, and a bunch of alerts that help me stay on top of traffic spikes and suspicious activity.
DNS + Cloudflare
Dynamic DNS was convenient to set up but quickly became a pain when random bots discovered my IP. Closing that hole with a zero trust tunnel and WAF rules drastically cut malicious scans.
Future Plans
Side Project, Not a Full Company
I’ve realized the business model here isn’t very strong—this started out as a side project for fun and I don't anticipate that changing. TL;DR is the critical mass of localized users needed to try and sell anything to a business would be pretty hard to achieve, especially for a hyper niche app, without significant marketing and a lot of luck. I'll have a write up about this on some future post, but also that topic isn't all that related to what r/selfhosted is for, so I'll refrain from going into those weeds here. I’m keeping it online because it’s extremely cheap to run given it's self-hosted and I enjoy tinkering.
Slowly Building New Features
Major changes to the app are on hold while I focus on other projects. But I do plan to keep refining performance and documentation as a fun learning exercise.
AMA
I’m happy to answer anything about self-hosting on Apple Silicon, performance optimizations, monitoring stacks, or other related selfhosted topics. My replies might take a day or so, but I’ll do my best to be thorough, helpful, and answer all questions that I am able to.
Thanks again for all the interest in my goofy selfhosted side project, and all the help/advice that was given during the last reddit-post experiment. Fire away with any questions, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!
