Published 2025-11-03T01:45:00Z by Physics Derivation Graph
I recently reverted away from using Neo4j as the database because a DigitalOcean droplet with enough memory costs $12/month (for 2GB of RAM), whereas without Neo4j I can use the $6/month VPS with 1 GB of RAM. The Neo4j database enables arbitrary user-specified Cypher queries, whereas the non-Neo4j site isn't as interactive: users are constrained to pre-defined queries.
I considered finding another database option, including SQL, but a relational database has a higher query complexity.
I could continue to use Neo4j locally (on my computer) and have a non-Neo4j website. I'm interested to see how many people have logged into my site. Using the instructions on
https://physicsderivationgraph.blogspot.com/2020/05/inspecting-list-of-users-who-have.html
in the repo allofphysics.com I found 3 novel-to-me users: a Chinese student, a 77 year old man from California, and a person who's name and email isn't on Google.
The window of when Neo4j was running was about 8 months.
Is there value in continuing to locally use Neo4j if that isn't what users see on the public website?
(The Neo4j would be available via Github and DockerHub, but that incurs a significant burden on users.)