I’m running a hobby project built with Django on Render’s free tier + Supabase’s free tier (Postgres) as the backend. Lately, I’ve been hit with random bursts of 503 Service Unavailable errors. When I dig into the logs, 99% of the issues are Supabase connection timeouts rather than logic crashes.
The core error I’m seeing is: psycopg2.OperationalError: connection to server at "aws-1-ap-southeast-1.pooler.supabase.com" (...), port 6543 failed: timeout expired.
The site works perfectly for hours, then suddenly chokes for 5–10 minutes before fixing itself and it usually triggers on a cache miss with it trying to hit the dB and timing out around 10seconds. I also noticed that my supabase ram is very low between 7MB and 40MB though the dB doesn't crash or restart I believe.
Render workers stay responsive on non-DB endpoints (pings return in ~1ms), so the stall seems localized specifically to the DB connection phase but I'm not sure about this
I'm a student and this is the first time I'm doing such a project so any debugging tips or insights would be very helpful. I was thinking of moving to Supabase pro as a last resort. I did find bugs in the code previously which led to cascading queries but right now I just can't pinpoint the issue.
AbdullahKhanSherwani is experiencing intermittent 503 Service Unavailable errors in a hobby project using Django and Supabase's free tier. The issue appears to be related to Supabase connection timeouts, particularly during cache misses. The user is seeking debugging tips and considering upgrading to Supabase pro as a last resort.