Any chance localtunnel will ever go back to normal?

[Parking-Master]

Hi. Just in case the developers or users haven't noticed, localtunnel has been terrible (no offense) for the past year now. There has been an ongoing issue of the "502 Bad Gateway" error, which isn't actually caused by users. It is caused by whatever is running localtunnel. It does not appear to have a cause, it just will randomly show this 502 page every few browser refreshes. On the other hand, even when my tunnel IS running, it sometimes also gets a "404" as if it's not running, even if I get past the 502 error. And even after all of that, if I'm lucky, my page will show up in a corrupted format after loading for a really long time, and it seems like the full content of the page isn't even getting transferred to my browser. This is not just an issue with me, everyone is having this issue; and it's kind of sad to see localtunnel like this.

I don't want to put any pressure on the developers (like @TheBoroer) but is there any way this will ever be fixed? Or at least better than it is now? Because as it stands, localtunnel is completely unusable and useless. I've moved onto other tunnel providers in the past few months, such as serveo.net and ngrok, but these also have their limitations. Ultimately, I would love to use localtunnel again, but like I said, it doesn't work anymore. Please, if there's anything anyone can do, at least try.

Thanks.

[TheBoroer]

Hey again @Parking-Master!
lol I'm so curious...what do you use localtunnel for?? I swear you notice EVERY issue or downtime with the service haha.
Honestly, I appreciate you pinging me when things are busted and I've either forgotten to look into it or the todo has been sitting on the backburner for way too long. 🙏

RE: 502 errors

I've looked into it over the last week or so and have done a bunch of tweaks to try to figure out what the root cause of the issues is. I'm 90% sure it's just another period where some IPs are spamming the server since i've noticed my rate limiting logic has been activated way more than before.

I'm still trying a few more things to get this under control so stay tuned. In the meantime, the 502s are intermittent and should go away after a refresh.

[Parking-Master]

lol I'm so curious...what do you use localtunnel for?? I swear you notice EVERY issue or downtime with the service haha.

@TheBoroer LOL - 😁 I just host a simple Node.js mailing tool on my local network (for a personal project) and I've used localtunnel for the past few years to access stuff like this publicly. In the coming months though, I'd like to host a few more personal projects that I can access publicly through localtunnel, and if possible, even stream some websockets too.

Thank you for taking a look at the issue and acknowledging. It is great to know that you still actively maintain localtunnel. Also, once the 502 problem is fixed, I'm sure the service should be mostly working again.

[TheBoroer]

@Parking-Master you're def a power user then!
If you plan on running a bunch more services, you should try out cloudflared which is a bit more technical in setup but you can setup tunnels through a custom domain you own (and have the reliability of cloudflare's network)

RE: localtunnel stability

I setup a status page (see #697) and also implemented some performance tweaks that seem to help drastically reduce the number of 502/503 errors so I hope things stay smooth sailing from here on out. Latency also seems to have improved and requests are flowing through at a good speed.

Let me know if things seem more stable to you :)

[Parking-Master]

@TheBoroer Wow! I definetely notice a substantial difference. Great job fixing everything, and thank you! The status page looks cool. I like how I can see CPU usage and stuff like that.

Also, I've checked cloudflared tunnels in the past, but they've never worked for me. Right now I'm following a more simple setup and I'll see if I can get a tunnel running for free.

Thanks!

[TheBoroer]

Also, I've checked cloudflared tunnels in the past, but they've never worked for me. Right now I'm following a more simple setup and I'll see if I can get a tunnel running for free.

Ah i see, yeah it needs more technical setup.

@TheBoroer Wow! I definetely notice a substantial difference. Great job fixing everything, and thank you! The status page looks cool. I like how I can see CPU usage and stuff like that.

Haha thank you! It's basic but each green tick is just a successful uptime check (runs every 60s)
I'm glad m tweaks seem to be working, I hope they hold up 🤞