Last year I was playing around with Neon and the cold starts were slow enough that I implemented a “Loading…” dialog box.

I haven’t touched it in a year, but I tried it just now and it still works. Cold startup for the Deno Fresh instance and the database query were about 700ms each, assuming I interpreted my logs correctly.

Subjectively, it’s slow enough that it’s worth putting up a dialog box, but it disappears fast enough that you don’t need a spinner or progress bar. A meta-refresh of one second seems good enough.

(I’m in California but the demo uses an East Coast instance for Neon. I set it up that way because I wanted to know how it would feel.)

Demo: https://postgres-counter-demo.deno.dev/

Source code: https://github.com/skybrian/postgres-counter-demo/