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Numbers on a wall.
Dashboard hosting
The chart is the easy part; the cost is turning a million rows into the one number behind it. Host your dashboard on fortrabbit.
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Features
Ten people watching. Fifty million rows behind them.
A PHP application whose whole job is to show numbers: an analytics panel, a reporting tool, a metrics wall on an office screen. The charts are the visible part, and the cheap part. The work sits behind them, in the queries that turn raw rows into the figure on display.
The aggregation runs before the request
The slow query is the one that reads a whole table to produce a single average. Running it on every page load ties the dashboard's speed to the size of the data, which only moves one way.
Cron jobs in the jobs component do that reading on a schedule and write the results into summary tables. The panel reads a small, ready-made row instead, and the expensive part already happened where nobody was waiting. A rollup over a year of events can take minutes in a worker without a browser tab spinning.
"Real time" is a poll, not a push
Persistent connections aren't available here, and it's worth being plain about it: nothing on the platform pushes an update to a panel that's already open. WebSockets and live-streaming charts are out.
What works is polling — the panel asks again every few seconds — or a refresh on the precomputed data as each rollup lands. For a dashboard that trails reality by design, the difference is hard to see.
The data outgrows the traffic
Ten people might watch a dashboard that sits on tens of millions of rows. Counted by visitors it looks idle; counted by the database it's the opposite. Load-based reasoning gives the wrong answer, the same as it does for an internal tool.
Components are booked one at a time, so MySQL grows on its own — more storage and memory for the data — while the PHP component stays small, each billed pro-rated by the day.
Why fortrabbit?
A dashboard's cost sits in the database, not the page, and the components here are built to grow apart. MySQL is managed as a first-class part of the platform, not bolted on beside it — PHP and MySQL have been the main event at fortrabbit from the start. Precompute in the jobs component, scale the database for the data while PHP stays small, and pay per day for exactly what each component uses. The numbers are ready before anyone thinks to ask for them.
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An honest account.
