[Done] Server will be migrated (More power!) (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ruud@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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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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[-] Ataraxia@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Wow that was fast.

[-] rarkgrames@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

[-] Ataraxia@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

[-] ndr@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

this is very Reddit-y of you

[-] Rhaedas@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago

Redditors made such memes a thing, we're taking them with us where we go.

[-] Izzent@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the awesome work!

[-] SkidFace@lemmy.world 2 points 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!

[-] BackOnMyBS@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

how nice people seem here

yes! I love the culture of this place so far

[-] impulse@lemmy.world 3 points 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 1 points 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.

[-] YoungPrinceAmmon@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

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

[-] Maiznieks@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 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.

[-] ndr@lemmy.world 1 points 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

[-] sensibilidades@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

what about that post made you think they were a russian troll?

[-] bobaduk@lemmy.world 1 points 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

[-] SkidFace@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Can confirm I am not a russian troll ;)

[-] lp0101@lemmy.world 2 points 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.

[-] parsifal@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Does it work on water now that it has MORE POWA?

[-] ZeeKay@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 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 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 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.

[-] fudrummer@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

@ruud@lemmy.world DM me if you need help setting up monitoring/alerting on server health. IRL I'm on an SRE team, so happy to help where I can!

[-] Refugee_Allstar@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Just donated $10! Appreciate all the work you all are doing to keep up with the growth.

[-] novettam@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year 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!

[-] WhatASave@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year 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.

[-] novettam@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year 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_HANI@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year 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.

[-] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year 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.

[-] PenguinTD@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year 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?)

[-] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

An instance owner decides. You can either make it whitelist or blacklist, your choice.

[-] Lermatroid@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year 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.

[-] solidsnake911@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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

[-] worfamerryman@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year 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?

[-] savjee@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year 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."

[-] worfamerryman@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year 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.

[-] savjee@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year 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!

[-] TheDarkBanana87@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year 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

[-] ruud@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year 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.