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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Wow that was fast.
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.
Good idea!
Feel free to ping me as well if something sets up. I currently don’t have the time or personal grit to run a full instance on my own, but I know how to run linux, postgres, mysql, networks and other things. Ansible/Chef mostly as well, some puppet, some salt. Been doing this for 10 years or so on different stacks.
I’d be happy to be part of some “Lemmy-OPs-Support” group, wherever it may be to chime in with experience.
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:
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Lemmy the platform is planet Earth
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“Instances” like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc. are like the different countries on Earth
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When someone signs up, the user picks one instance to be a part of, like how an Earthling becomes a citizen of a country
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
To add to this, you can use exclamation point “!” To link people to communities in a way that won’t take them away from their home instance. Likewise you can use @ for users.
Example: !eli5@lemmy.blahaj.zone Or: @Soullioness@lemmy.world
It even auto fills when you type
Edit: might be wrong about it linking universally.
This absolutely is not true today, they create links that are absolute and refer to the host of the community in question.
I’m working on a Firefox extension to add a link going to your home instance.
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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!
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
wow, that’s actually a really nice feature. I wonder how it works though, i guess their text just will be blacked out for me, or will the post and all answers to it be completely vanish?
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.
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…
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.
