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.

  • SkidFace@lemmy.world
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    1 year 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.world
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      1 year 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.world
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        1 year 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.world
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      1 year 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.world
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        1 year 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.world
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        1 year 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.world
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          1 year 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.world
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    1 year 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.de
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      1 year 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.world
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        1 year 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.org
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          1 year ago

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

          • pleasemakesense@lemmy.world
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            1 year 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.dev
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      1 year 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.world
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        1 year 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.

  • Cool Beance@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    For less tech-savvy newbies (like me), in case there is some confusion affecting your urge to engage/donate… My friend gave me a great explanation:

    • Lemmy the platform is planet Earth

    • “Instances” like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc. are like the different countries on Earth

    • When someone signs up, the user picks one instance to be a part of, like how an Earthling becomes a citizen of a country

    • If you register at lemmy.world, that means your home instance/ “home country” is lemmy.world, but you can “travel” to lemmy.ml, another instance / “country”, to check out and subscribe to their community

    • When you subscribe to a different instance that’s not your home instance, you can still participate in their content, and other people will be able to see which instance / “country” you’re from

    • Each instance can have its own version of the same “subreddit”, so you can have a c/Memes in your home instance that is different from a c/Memes in another instance. But you can subscribe to both separately

    • c/[community name] is the naming convention used here I think like r/[subreddit name] on Reddit. If talking about a community in a different instance, it’s c/[community name]@[instance name] so like c/memes@lemmy.ml

    • Donations will help with the cost of running lemmy.world only and not lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.

    Someone please correct any of this if any of it is wrong, I’ll happily edit

  • Clutch@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

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

  • Mango@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    I don’t understand why a dedicated server is a good idea, when the only true way to scale is to use like Kubernetes or Docker and ECS Containers with scale?

    Your just gonna run into more problems, you cannot vertically scale forever.

  • ZeeKay@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year 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.social
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      1 year 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 @ruud@lemmy.world is currently doing.