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.

  • SkidFace@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 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!

    • impulse@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 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?

      • bandario@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 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.

    • Maiznieks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      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@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

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

      • BOMBS@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 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

        • bobaduk@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 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

  • Luca@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 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.

    • Gollum@feddit.deEnglish
      0·
      2 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…

      • pleasemakesense@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 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@lemmy.vepta.orgEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

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

          • pleasemakesense@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 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)

    • terebat@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      2 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@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 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.

  • ZeeKay@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    1·
    2 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.

    • slashzero@hakbox.socialEnglish
      2·
      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.

  • delaghetto@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    So, I just want to make sure I understand this as I am a new user from reddit. Instances are server based and cost money. Instances are Lemmy.World, Beebaw, Lemmy.Film, etc etc. These are all seperate hosted instances. Correct?

    And donations would help pay for the server, ie lemmy.world?

    • fubo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      “Lemmy instances” are analogous to “email servers”: your account is hosted on one of them, but you can communicate with people on other ones, because the servers know how to talk to each other.

      Expanding the capacity of the Lemmy service will involve both (1) more instances, and (2) more resources for existing instances.

  • Clutch@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

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

    • mo_ztt ✅@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      You can! ☑️ or ✅. The Patreon page mentioned that you’re officially allowed to edit your username to add flair when you donate. I upgraded to $8/month specifically so I could add the flair, but then got cold feet about the idea. 😀

        • mo_ztt ✅@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          I was just worried that people wouldn’t get the joke and it would just come across as odd. IDK, maybe it’s actually a good thing if it makes people curious, to encourage more people to do the Patreon.

          • FlaxPicker@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            2 years ago

            I think donators should get a certain level of respect for contributing monetarily. Its not everyone out here donating haha. Some flair is a good way to have a badge that signifies that contribution.