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 @[email protected] for assisting with that.

  • Clutch
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    12 years ago

    Is one donation method preferred over another? That is to say, is one cheaper than the other?

  • @[email protected]
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    02 years ago

    Would be awesome if you create some group chat (e.g. Discord?) and add sysadmins/devops to it. Would be more than happy to assist, especially if you have questions or need opinions.

    I’ve been working as sre/sysadmin/devops for the past ~5 years and ~9 years of (Arch) Linux user. More than 1K Arch Wiki edits over that period of time.

  • Disney Fan
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    22 years ago

    Came here from Reddit and I already love it so much more! :)

  • @[email protected]
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    22 years ago

    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!

    • @[email protected]
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      32 years ago

      Truth is for me as someone who used Reddit for about the last 16 years, it very much feels like the early days of Reddit again.

      Which is a very good thing, because that’s what I originally signed up for compared to a metric fuckton of karma farming spam bots.

      I just hope it gains enough traction to be sustainable in the long run, especially considering that it’s relying on donations for funding, I believe?

      • @[email protected]
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        12 years ago

        undefined> metric fuckton of karma farming spam bots.

        People are hard at work writing bots for lemmy so don’t worry, you’ll be able to enjoy your regular hogwash again really soon.

        Personally I think lemmy should go as far out of its way as possible to make bots in any and all forms just about impossible.

        • ChrisostomeStrip
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          22 years ago

          Yeah, we can enjoy while it lasts, because with more users more questionable content will come

    • BOMBS
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      32 years ago

      how nice people seem here

      yes! I love the culture of this place so far

    • Maiznieks
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      2 years ago

      Found one russian troll already. Oh well…

      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.

      • Drew Got No Clue
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        12 years ago

        Lesson learned today: never take anything for granted—if there’s a chance to be massively misunderstood, it will eventually happen lol

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          I think they meant they’ve seen one Russian troll on Lemmy already, not that skidface is a Russian troll.

          I … Have to assume so, anyway

      • BOMBS
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        12 years ago

        you can easily block any user by click on the 🚫 sign under their comment, and never have to deal with their bs again

  • Wintry
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    12 years ago

    Thank you very much. The welcome for all us reddit refugees has been really warm and it’s deeply appreciated.

  • @[email protected]
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    02 years ago

    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

    • RuudOPM
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      02 years ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        12 years ago

        Hello, after reading all the comments, I realized that I share the same questions (sort of) with the others.

        Thank you for replying and clarify things

        Cheers Ruud. And thank you 😊

  • @[email protected]
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    02 years ago

    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.

    Thanks!

    • @[email protected]
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      02 years ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        02 years ago

        So, mostly correct. Lemme clarify:

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          02 years ago

          can the instance owner limit the rate of amount pulled? Say, if a malicious user joins a small server, and then subs every known nsfw instances’ communities what then? Like is lemmy by default a whitelist approach or blacklist? (or maybe somewhere in the middle?)

      • @[email protected]
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        02 years ago

        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.

        • LUHG
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          12 years ago

          This was exactly my issue. My feddit.uk instance was very slow. Couldn’t interact or search on Jerboa using URL. Lemmy.World instace is much better. Donation to the cause on the way.

  • @[email protected]
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    02 years ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      12 years ago

      iOS only? Or also Android? Btw, you receive notifications on Jerboa? What do you use for Lemmy on Android?

  • ZeeKay
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    12 years ago

    Just curious, what sort of hardware is lemmy.world using/moving to? Wondering if there’s a good way to predict load based on number of users.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 years ago

      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 @[email protected] is currently doing.

  • Luca
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    22 years ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      02 years ago

      Doesn’t support HA or horizontal scaling yet from what I read. Unsure if kbin does. Probably would have to add support for horizontal scaling to have that auto scaling do anything.

      • Luca
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        12 years ago

        Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of. Understandable though, since horizontal scaling/HA usually isn’t a priority when developing a new application.

    • Gollum
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      02 years ago

      The code is open source on GitHub and the backend is written in Rust.

      I have no idea how it goes in terms of scaling…

      • @[email protected]
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        02 years ago

        Apparently it’s not ideal at Horizontal scaling (that’s what I’ve picked up from reading stuff here, could be wrong)

        • nulldev
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          02 years ago

          I think they can horizontally scale the Postgres maybe? Postgres is probably the biggest performance bottleneck.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 years ago

            Have they implemented the postgres? Last I read they were still using websockets (I think I’m not a programmer and don’t know what all that means lmfao)

  • @[email protected]
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    02 years ago

    Are you running this out of your home?

    I have self hosted small things before, but I was always curious about lager stuff like this.

    What are your internet speeds?

    • @[email protected]
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      02 years ago

      Check the updated post. It’s running on a dedicated server hosted by Hetzner. Specs are high-end: “AMD EPYC 7502P 32 Cores “Rome” CPU and 128GB RAM.”

      • @[email protected]
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        02 years ago

        Thanks for letting me know. I also have my work stuff on Hetzner. But I do not see “Hetzner” listed in this post.

        Have you ever hosted on Vultr? I need a server with less latency and Vultr seems to have servers in a good location for my needs.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          Ah you’re right. The post only states the specs. The fact that it’s hosted on Hetzner was mentioned in a comment (1, 2)

          I personally have no experience with Vultr. Sorry!