Meteor 3.5.1 on Galaxy metal - my experience

deployment
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I’m all fired up with Meteor 3.5.1 on Galaxy Metal, and I thought I’d write a quick post mortem for those interested.

First and foremost, everything is much quicker. I run a single quad container and on metal it’s definitely faster than on the legacy infrastructure. Combine that with Meteor’s change streams where my publications are way faster & more efficient (almost doubly so) and my app has got a fantastic performance boost courtesy of the Meteor/Galaxy teams.

Congratulations & thanks, guys - great progress :pray: :clap:.

My Metal migration wasn’t a smooth experience, but it’s been worth it in the end. I’m going to list the things that went wrong as “lessons learnt” so any future migrations work better (though I’m told that for the vast majority of apps, there were no problems. I guess I was unlucky :black_cat:):

  • Migration was substantially behind schedule as advertised in 2025
  • Despite agreeing to a forewarning, my migration was made without one (and it had to be reverted)
  • The migration necessitated me to update, and refactor the use of, a few 3rd party libraries my app used as they would not build on metal - contrary to the “seamless” promise.
  • The setup was initially wrong such that I had horrible latency for a few days between the metal server and Atlas DB
  • The killing of sockets every 30 minutes that the new proxy servers now employ, caused subscription storms and performance issues - until I upgraded to 3.5.1. A policy I still have issues with.
  • External HTTP calls to the server now time-out (within a minute, I think) - they used not to. Again, a change that I’ve had to adjust my system to cater for (though admittedly for the better)

And at one point, a reversion to legacy failed to work and my server was completely down for an hour or two. This highlighted the fantastic record that I’ve had with Galaxy since I started - my server has never been down for 7 years!

So, here’s to 7 more years of continuous up-time and super-improved performance :tada:

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Hey @dthwaite, thanks for writing this up, it’s useful.

Really glad to hear the app is much quicker on Metal now, and that change streams is actually helping on the publications. That’s what we wanted people to feel.

Sorry the migration was such a mess to get there. We’ll share this with the team, we should have done better.

Happy you’re on the other side of it now and that it was worth it in the end.

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3

Hey @dthwaite, thank you for taking the time to write this up! Feedback laid out this honestly, rough edges included, is far more useful to us than a clean success story, and it’s great to see the performance gains landing on your side.

It’s been a real pleasure working through this with you. You dug deeper into what was happening than most people would, and some of what came out of it reached other customers because you kept pushing on it.

I won’t pretend the ride was smooth. What matters to us is that we stayed with it until it was actually working for you, and I’m glad the jump has been worth it in the end.

If anything comes up, you know where to find us. I’ll do my best to help if you need.

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