So after we've extended the virtual cloud server twice, we're at the max for the current configuration. And with this crazy growth (almost 12k users!!) even now the server is more and more reaching capacity.
Therefore I decided to order a dedicated server. Same one as used for mastodon.world.
So the bad news... we will need some downtime. Hopefully, not too much.
I will prepare the new server, copy (rsync) stuff over, stop Lemmy, do last rsync and change the DNS. If all goes well it would take maybe 10 minutes downtime, 30 at most.
(With mastodon.world it took 20 minutes, mainly because of a typo :-) )
For those who would like to donate, to cover server costs, you can do so at our OpenCollective or Patreon
Thanks!
Update The server was migrated. It took around 4 minutes downtime. For those who asked, it now uses a dedicated server with a AMD EPYC 7502P 32 Cores "Rome" CPU and 128GB RAM. Should be enough for now.
I will be tuning the database a bit, so that should give some extra seconds of downtime, but just refresh and it's back. After that I'll investigate further to the cause of the slow posting. Thanks @veroxii@lemmy.world for assisting with that.
Like many others, I came from Reddit and was initially hesitant to try it out, but I love this place so much! It really feels like the "worse" parts of Reddit have been skimmed off, and that definitely shows with how nice people seem here! Thank you so much!
Edit: lol, was not referring to OP, it was some world news post comment with chiese username that spread misinformation about russian war in ukraine. I just added my thoughts on the community.
I'm not too familiar with Lemmy's codebase, but I am a devops engineer. Is the software written in any way to support horizontal scaling? If so, I'd be happy to consult/help to get the instance onto an autoscaling platform eventually.
Yes. It’s called performance testing. Basically an engineer would need to setup test user transactions to simulate live traffic and load test the system to see how everything scales, where it breaks, etc. Then you can use the results of the tests to figure out how big of an instance you should use for your projected number of users.
Jmeter, and locust.io are the two biggest open source performance test tools.
The alternative is take a wild guess. See how the system behaves, and make adjustments in real time… like what @ruud@lemmy.world is currently doing.
Performance is looking awesome, lemmy.world is responding very fast to community subscription requests and search is also very fast. My experience when using other instances was that search didn't work at all, hindering community discovery.
This is how I understand it: a current limitation (feature?) Is that you can only search from your instance to other communities if someone from your instance has interacted with it. But if you use https://browse.feddit.de/ you can search across all instances. Then subscribe to it, or search the whole url in your own instances search. Once an instance interacts with another, now other people from your instance can search for it by simple name.
If you do a URL search in the communities page (with all settings set to "All", even "Communities"), your instance will pull in a few of the latest posts and comments. Not anything too heavy, just enough to give you an idea of what's going on.
The moment a single user on your instance subscribes, your instance will start pulling in everything from that community. If every instance pulled in every community from every other instance, the network would be very vulnerable to a botspam instance that goes up would crash everything. Much better for an instance to only pull in communities that people are interested in.
Oh, so it is due to the larger userbase here! There is a larger chance that someone already subscribed to a community I am looking for.
Still, when I was using another instance, subscribing to communities at lemmy.world was instantaneous while subbing to communities at beehaw.org or lemmy.ml often took more than one try.
It also doesn't help that lemmy.ml where a lot of users migrated at first seems to be having issues right now.
Also on jerboa searching for communities by url doesn't seem to be working.
Hopefully the influx of new users and attention helps improving and ironing some issues like it happened with mastodon.
Hello, i still doesn't quite grasp about the concept of federation and about how fediverse works.
But does it means that one instance can only run from one server?
Say
lemmy.world running on Server A
lemmy.ml running on Server B
User can register on whichever they want and can see the post from server A and Server B
But when Server A reach maximum capacity, can Server A scale up or distribute the load to multiple instances?
How can we solve the issue of computing power when more and more users migrate to using this services
Thank you 😀
Sorry if its a dumb question, but the whole Federation concept is still new to me. I created multiple account to log in to beehaw, mastodon, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml at first because i dont know that with one user, i can see other communities from another instances
Optimal would be if users would spread over many servers, instead of all coming to Lemmy.world.
But most users don't fully understand the Federation concept so they think they need to register here so they can see local content?
I think the current server can handle a lot of users. It's just the software that isn't ready for it.. but that will improve. If ever this server gets too small, next step would be to scale using Kubernetes, but also that requires the software to be better prepared for that.
Went ahead and subbed on patreon. Hope that lemmy survives the growing pains and can develop some of the community that reddit had!
Also if there are any fellow former apollo users would def recommend checking out Mlem, its in testflight right now but seems to be working towards the experience that apollo gave on reddit.