Hey everyone, I’m having trouble with my Telegram bot. It’s built with Node.js and Telegraf, and I’ve put it on Vercel. The bot’s supposed to handle referrals, but it’s acting up.
Here’s the deal:
When I use /start after the bot’s been quiet for a while, it takes forever to answer.
Once it wakes up, it’s all good and speedy for the next commands.
The slow start is messing with my referral system. By the time the bot gets around to it, the user’s already signed up.
I’ve tried to make the bot check if the user’s in our system. If they’re not, it should add them as a referral. But with this delay, it’s not working right.
My setup:
Using Telegraf for the bot stuff
It’s on Vercel
Checking user info with an API call
Has anyone run into this? Any ideas on how to get the bot to respond faster on that first /start? It’s driving me nuts!
sounds like a cold start issue with vercel. maybe try keepin ur bot warm with periodic pings? also, u could optimize ur api calls or use caching. i had similar probs & found that setting up a simple keepalive helped a ton. good luck!
I’ve encountered similar issues with Vercel-hosted bots. The sluggish initial response is likely due to Vercel’s serverless architecture and cold starts. To mitigate this, consider implementing a warm-up strategy. You could set up a separate service to ping your bot endpoint periodically, keeping it “warm” and responsive. Additionally, optimize your API calls and database queries for faster execution. If possible, implement caching mechanisms to reduce latency on subsequent requests. For critical operations like referral handling, exploring the possibility of using a separate, always-on service or a different hosting solution might be worthwhile.
From personal experience, Vercel’s cold start issues can be quite challenging for time-critical operations. I encountered a similar problem and found that setting up a cron job to periodically ping the bot kept it responsive during low-activity periods. I also shifted the main referral processing to an always-on microservice so that delays were minimized. Additionally, optimizing API calls and database queries, along with introducing caching with Redis, greatly improved overall performance without the need to manage the complexities of a full VPS setup.