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.
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I’m not an engineer or a dev - but requiring a 32-core, $2000+ CPU to support 12k users doesn’t seem like it would scale well. Is this normal, or does the fediverse require more computational resources than a simpler setup like reddit? How would a fediverse instance with 100k users be maintained?
Look at the pricing!
Hetzner wants 150€ for this server. 3TB disk is 50€ extra. So 200€ for the server per month. This is also about 200$ so 1.6¢ per user and month. This should be very manageable.
Also it doesn’t mean the server only holds 12k users. If the server holds 20k users or more you Look at less than a Cent cost per user and month.
They are already raising 600€ per month via Patron only so 3 months worth per month. If the server gets bigger, more people will probably give money and while it stays a kinda hobby project it should work out fine.
But you are right with something else:
Lemmy currently has no ability to loadbalance over multiple servers for one instance. This will become a Problem in the future, but it is being worked at.Reddit is not a “simpler setup”. Reddit has gigantic amounts of computational resources to throw at things. Resources that make servers like this look like a Raspberry Pi. They’re just much less transparent about how the backend works and what they have.
Was thinking the same thing, is a lemmy instance supposed to be literally a single server instance?
I’m also interested in the answer to this question.
I hope not all people will go back to reddit as soon as the communities go public again.
The two day blackout was what finally got me to actually look into the fediverse, figure out servers and whatnot, and make an account to try it out. I’ve been meaning to look into it for a while, but the blackout was the push I needed. I’m sure I’m not alone. I’m far more interested in exploring this exciting new space then I am going back to the garbage filled Reddit, even if they miraculously back down on the API changes .
My reddit account was over 10 years old. This is my first comment on Lemmy/Fediverse.
Relate. 12 year account, would like to see this take off. They’re not changing.
I will stay here. Did not have this feeling of internet independence for a very long time. I’m done with Reddit.
I don’t plan on it. RIF was my main way of browsing Reddit so once that goes, that’s pretty much me done. I’ll probably still peruse sysadmin for work purposes, but my Reddit time will become Lemmy time.
I am in a transition period where I still keep Apollo installed, and trying to find enough communities here in order to be somewhat ready for the July 🙈
I have deleted nearly 10 years worth of content and account already. Those leaving should do the same.
I’m more or less getting what I wanted out of reddit out of lemmy already. There are a few teething pains, but overall it reminds me of the nice little community we had at reddit in 2007. It got better and better until about 2012 after the big digg migration where it started to peak and devolve. I would love to relive those first 5 years here again. I don’t miss reddit at all.
I know I won’t!
I’m just gonna browse both for a while I guess. I know I’m not downloading the official app on my phone though
I’m gonna browse Reddit occasionally as well due to its large back content, albeit with adblocks and privacy extensions up and running, but I will only post here. Might be a good idea to mirror anything I end up referring to on Reddit.
Iirc somebody is working on a mirror system. I’ll try find it but it’s on Reddit somewhere.
King Ruud is good to us
Thank you very much. The welcome for all us reddit refugees has been really warm and it’s deeply appreciated.
Thanks for accommodating us!
Thank you for making this happen! Just signed up for a regular donation to help with costs 👍
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!
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?
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.
Yeah, we can enjoy while it lasts, because with more users more questionable content will come
how nice people seem here
yes! I love the culture of this place so far
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.
you can easily block any user by click on the 🚫 sign under their comment, and never have to deal with their bs again
Lesson learned today: never take anything for granted—if there’s a chance to be massively misunderstood, it will eventually happen lol
what about that post made you think they were a russian troll?
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
Can confirm I am not a russian troll ;)
as one of the new people here, awesome!
Wow that was fast.
this is very Reddit-y of you
Redditors made such memes a thing, we’re taking them with us where we go.
Didn’t realise you could respond with images on lemmy. Smoother jokes than r***it…
I will add, joking aside, that Ruud is doing a bloody good job (sorry, I don’t know yet how to tag a user).
Like this: @ruud@lemmy.world parent thinks you’re doing a bloody good job! (Me too!)
Thanks @lhx@lemmy.world and @rarkgrames@lemmy.world !
When a volunteer can run a server better then a big tech company
unsurprising pikachu face
To be fair the volunteer isn’t trying to squeeze value out of the users to inflate his IPO.
Won’t somebody think about the corporations!
Ruud is rad!!
I really appreciate what you’re doing, but I’m worried how this instance will continue scaling. What happens when it gets to 1 million users? 10 million? We can scale vertically only somewhat, but horizontal scaling seems to be limited to “just join a new instance 4head” and that just…doesn’t have a good experience.
This server can easily host 1M users.
Most stress on the server comes from all the signups and newcomers posting a lot. After a while that becomes less. On Mastodon, the first days in November I had over 100k active users. Now I have 165k accounts but around 32k active.
And I’m sure the Lemmy devs will also improve the performance of the site. They never really had to, a few days ago the total number of Lemmy users over all instances was 7k.
Is data actually replicated among the different servers? Is (data from other servers) just cached temporarily or is it permanently stored on local DBs?
I checked lemmy docs but I couldn’t find a clear answer.
I was wondering what kind of strain the immense influx of people could put on network and DBs other than just servers, specifically in case of the number of servers raising a lot, not just users on a single server.
Ya what are the limitations with scaling horizontally? Scaling up is a stop gap.
Ruud, thank you for your investment here though.
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!
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.
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.
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.
anyone knows what does the “subscribe pending” means??
likely an issue with your request, i’ve had the same issue on multiple occasions, usually fixed by clicking the pending button and then resubscribing, takes a few tries sometimes
I think it’s happening when instances are running into lag federating with each other, and means that content from that community might take a while to populate your subscribed feed.
eg my subscription to Kbin’s gaming community shows up as pending, but federation with kbin has been broken for a while because of their cloudflare settings. guessing these sorts of pending things will clear up once things settle down a bit.
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.
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?)
An instance owner decides. You can either make it whitelist or blacklist, your choice.
ahh, thanks, good to know. :)
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.
Perhaps having the lemmy main site suggest servers with less load in a dynamic way would help with this. Instance xyz is now recommended on the main page due to having less users. The main problem I see with that is that there are different “themed” and what is suggested may not match up with the user’s preferences and tastes.
Thanks for setting up and managing the instances.
This is already the case I think. But the server must meet certain requirements, including specifically opting into being recommended.
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 😊
You’re seeing mostly CPU bottlenecks I assume?
What’s your RAM and storage situation looking like?
It does matter where you call home though because beehaw just defederated and there was quite a lot of good content there.
I’m trying to figure out why I even saw this post! I’ve never been to lemmy.world - I’m logged in to (and currently browsing) sh.itjust.works. Not sure why it’s showing me this post.
Gonna take a while to wrap my redditor brain around this stuff!
That’s what we mean when we talk about federation!
All the instances are interconnected (unless they block each other). You can post, vote, comment, and even become a moderator of a community on any other instance.
In many ways, it’s all one big site. In many ways it’s also not, but to the end user who just wants to browse around, it’s not as important as people make it out to be.
There’s some rough edges around community discovery, cross-instance linking, etc. But the devs are working hard on fixing those issues.
I understood that I would see remote (is that the right word?) communities to which I had subscribed. Am I also seeing communities to which my local users have subscribed? I don’t think I’d want that.
There’s a few tabs at the top of the feed (on the site, apps might be different)
“Local” shows all content from communities on your instance.
“All” shows content from all communities on all instances that your instance has “discovered”. Your instance will discover a remote community once at least one member of your instance searches for it and subscribes.
“Subscribed” shows content from communities you’ve subscribed to, both local and remote.
Thank you! That’s tremendously helpful.
Just donated $10! Appreciate all the work you all are doing to keep up with the growth.
Seems like you’ve suddenly got a weight to bare. You’re clearly lifting it. 👍
