Optimize Performance

Railway offers some quick and easy ways to configure deployments for achieving optimal performance.

Specifically, we offer the following features:

  • Horizontal Scaling with Replicas (vertical scaling is done automatically)
  • Regional Deployments

Continue reading for information on how to configure these.

Configure Horizontal Scaling

Scale horizontally by manually increasing the number of replicas for a service.

Screenshot of replica setting

To change the number of replicas per deploy within your service, go to the service settings view and look for the "Replicas" field in the "Deploy" section. This will create multiple instances of your service and distribute traffic between them.

Replica ID Environment Variable

Each replica will be deployed with a Railway-provided environment variable named RAILWAY_REPLICA_ID which can be used for logging and monitoring, for example.

Load Balancing Between Replicas

At the moment, Railway will randomly distribute requests to the replicas of your service. We plan to add more advanced load balancing strategies in the future. If you need more advanced load balancing, you can use an external load balancer such as Cloudflare to distribute traffic between your services.

Note: For now Railway does not support sticky sessions nor report the usage of the replicas within the metrics view.

Configure a Region

Railway's infrastructure spans multiple regions across the globe, and by default Railway deploys to us-west1 located in Portland, Oregon.

To choose a different region for your service, go to your service settings and select the desired region -

Region Picker

Additional regions may be added in the future as Railway continues expanding its infrastructure footprint.

Set a Default Region

To set a default, or preferred, region, do so from the command palette. From your project settings:

  • Type CMD+K or Ctrl+K to access the command palette
  • Type "preferred region"
  • Select your preferred region
Preferred Region Picker

Impact of Region Changes

For information on the impact of changing a service's region, see the Regions reference guide.

Singleton Deploys

By default, Railway maintains only one deploy per service.


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