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A market demo with no server behind it

2026-10-20

The market demo kept going down, so it became static pages. That also showed how expensive a single careless query had been.

The market demo at market.wascape.com lasted five days on a live server. Each page used hundreds of milliseconds of processing, which is far over what a free plan allows, and the surge finished it off.

Looking at the database showed one query doing most of the damage. The recent activity feeds joined four tables, and a single feed query read 28,803 rows. Filtering on one copied column took that to 107 rows. Same page, about 270 times less work.

I fixed that and then went further, because a demo with fake traders has no reason to run a server. The whole thing was crawled into about 2,200 static pages. You can browse everything, and anything that would change data shows a small notice. It costs nothing to serve and it cannot fall over.

It is a demo, and it says so: play money, made-up users, nothing is sold.