I’ve been experiencing significant delays in the startup time of my backend application.
The backend application, developed using ExpressJs and MongoDB, serves requests coming from another service where my React application is hosted.
However, the initial startup time ranges from 30 to 60 seconds, occasionally even taking as long as 5-10 seconds if I’m lucky. Most of the time, though, it takes an unacceptably long time to start up.
I suspect this issue might be related to the free plan I’m currently on. Could you please advise me on which plan I should upgrade to?
Your service here sounds like it’s using our free instance type. Free instance types spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity and then will restart when they next receive a request. This behavior is documented at https://render.com/docs/free.
If you need your service always be available, moving to a paid instance type avoids this behavior, and the service will remain running constantly.
To change the instance type, follow these steps:
Navigate to the service in our dashboard
Open the ‘settings’ tab
Click on the ‘Change Instance Type’ button
Select the instance type you wish to use (the minimum to avoid sleeping is Starter)
If you want to change back to the free instance type, repeat this process but select ‘free’
Changing the instance type is done at the service level, it only applies to the service that you are changing to use a paid instance type. Other services will continue using the instance type they are presently using.
