Just wanted to let you know where we are with Lemmy.world.
Issues
As you might have noticed, things still won't work as desired.. we see several issues:
Performance
Loading is mostly OK, but sometimes things take forever
We (and you) see many 502 errors, resulting in empty pages etc.
System load: The server is roughly at 60% cpu usage and around 25GB RAM usage. (That is, if we restart Lemmy every 30 minutes. Else memory will go to 100%)
Bugs
Replying to a DM doesn't seem to work. When hitting reply, you get a box with the original message which you can edit and save (which does nothing)
2FA seems to be a problem for many people. It doesn't always work as expected.
Troubleshooting
We have many people helping us, with (site) moderation, sysadmin, troubleshooting, advise etc. There currently are 25 people in our Discord, including admins of other servers. In the Sysadmin channel we are with 8 people. We do troubleshooting sessions with these, and sometimes others. One of the Lemmy devs, @[email protected] is also helping with current issues.
So, all is not yet running smoothly as we hoped, but with all this help we'll surely get there! Also thank you all for the donations, this helps giving the possibility to use the hardware and tools needed to keep Lemmy.world running!
i just wanted to thank you for doing your best to fix lemmy.world as soon as possible.
but please, don't feel forced to overwork yourselves.
i understand you want to do it soon so more people can move from Reddit,
but i wouldn't like that Lemmy software and community developers overwork and feel miserable,
as those things are some of the very motives you escaped from Reddit in first place.
in my opinion, it would be nice that we users understand this situation and, if we want lemmy so bad, we actively help with it.
this applies to all lemmy instances and communities, ofc.
have a nice day you all! ^^
so true, pal!
slowly, with patience, no rushing, putting love into it, organizing ourselves, working smart is better than working hard and fast.
because of the federated nature of fediverses like Lemmy, it is very possible that many people are doing the very same task without even knowing they are duping each other's efforts.
and that's sad because if they knew, they could be teaming up, or splitting the task in two, in order to avoid wasting different efforts into dupe results.
i have learnt a thing or two about burnout, it's better for me to make 40% planning, and 40 % self-care and so the 20 % of execution becomes piece of cake.
but this is just my opinion. anyway, please take care, pals <3
As a game dev for bigwigs I know all too well about memory leaks, and so very much appreciate your patch notes, updates, and transparency. You're doing great with such fast exponential growth
As somebody who flocked to Voat during the height of the Ellen Pao controversy and remembered the site being rendered unusable for whole days at a time from the Reddit Hug of Death, I'm remarkably surprised at how well Lemmy.world has held up. I thought the fediverse would have truly crumbled from this exodus.
I remember when Voat came out and the slight exedous that brought. I made an account and everything but it never properly took off. I checked on it two or three years later and it was just filled with alt-right/racist/transphobic garbage. Sad it never took off as a reddit alternative, reddit likely would have greatly benefited from a proper alternative, not sad it closed down after I saw what it ended up.
So far the fediverse feels really different tho, very explicitly anti that type of shit. I'm sure it will pop up, they always do, but maybe now people know how to deal with it. Block it, defederate, deplatform.
This is the level of transparency that most companies should strive for. Ironic that in terms of fixing things, volunteer and passion projects seem to be more on top of issues compared to big companies with hundreds of employees.
You said it: passion projects. While being paid is surely a motivator, seeing your pet project take off the way Lemmy is can be so intoxicating and rewarding! I plan to donate as soon as I get paid on Friday! I want to see this succeed, even if it is just to spite Reddit, and I am willing to pay for the pleasure.
@ruud > That is, if we restart Lemmy every 30 minutes. Else memory will go to 100%
Hmm, makes me curious if there is a Lemmy memory leak, or simply that the load wants to stabilize above of the RAM you have? I hope contributions can help you with another 32 GB RAM? Thank you for your work! 🍻
I haven't checked into the code yet, but I imagine you can map out what all is in memory and force more aggressive garbage collection to find some middle ground.
Thanks for all of your effort. Even though we are on different instances, it’s important for the Fediverse community that you succeed. You are doing valuable work, and I appreciate it.
Not just that, but the code contributed to Lemmy by this debugging will make Lemmy run faster for everyone on every instance, which is makes the ecosystem that much better.
The work you're doing is greatly appreciated! It's like you invited half the internet into your house. I feel like I should've brought a cake or something
You should consider setting up a small donation to the site, if you can afford it. If you throw $5 a month at them, you're not only covering your own hosting fees, but covering for some of the folks who can't afford to as well. And maybe Ruud gets to buy some beans.
Huge respect for what you've built here, but it might be worth reaching out to the lemm.ee admin. I only know enough DevOps and cloud hosting to be dangerous, not helpful. But his instance seems stable and scalable. He might be able to offer some insight into the issues here
Of course these performance issues are a bit annoying, but I gotta say that I love these updates and explanations here. Great communication, keep it up, please!
If I have an account at lemmy.world, but have another instance selected, does that take some of the burden off the admins or do I need to do something more?
.world is definitely running smoother than when I joined 3 days ago, back then it was impossible to comment and the lag was immense, right now I just have to occasionally reload the page, but that's nothing in comparison.
You guys are doing an amazing work! I'm broke, so here are some coins 🪙🪙🪙🪙 beans 🫘🫘🫘🫘
Ackchually, leaking memory is totally possible in Rust! But so is hogging way too much of it because you're hanging on to too many things in memory at once🤷
Cloud architect here— I’m sure someone’s probably already brought it up, but I’m curious if any cloud native services have been considered to take the place of what I’m sure are wildly expensive server machines. E.g. serve frontends from cloudfront, host the read-side API on Lambda@Edge so you can aggressively and regionally cache API responses, anything other than an SQL for the database — model it in DynamoDB for dirt cheap wicked speed, or Neptune for a graph database that’s more expensive but more featureful. Drop sync jobs for federated connections into SQS, have a lambda process that too, and it will scale as horizontally as you need to clear the queue in reasonable time.
It’s not quite as simple to develop and deploy as docker containers you can throw anywhere, but the massive scale you can achieve with that for fractions of the cost of servers or fargate with that much RAM is pretty great.
Or maybe you already tried/modeled this and discovered it’s terrible for you use case, in which case ignore me ;-)
You were so close until you mentioned trying to ditch SQL. Lemmy is 100% tied hard to it, and trying to replicate what it does without ACID and Joins is going to require a massive rewrite. More importantly - Lemmy's docs suggest a docker-compose stack, not even k8s for now, it's trying really hard not to tie into a single cloud provider and avoid having three cloud deployment scripts. Which means SQS, lambdas and cloudfront out in the short term. Quick question, are there any STOMP compliant vendors for SQS and lambda equivalent yet?
Also, the growth lemmy.world has seen has been far outside what any team could handle ime. Most products would have closed signups to handle current load and scale, well done to all involved!
cloudfront helps a lot with the client and is absolutely compatible with lemmy if you set it up correctly. possibly it could also help cache api responses, i haven't looked into that part yet.
the database, on the other hand, would need a nearly full rewrite. lemmy uses postgres and dumping it for something else would be a huge pain for the entire federated community. it could probably tear it in half.
there's also the issue of pictrs, which uses a stateful container and isn't yet able to use an external database which would allow you to scale it horizontally. resolving that one is on the roadmap though, and for the most part you can aggressively cache the pictrs get requests to alleviate the read-side load.
but whatever the solution is, it kinda needs to be as simple as developing and deploying docker containers you can throw anywhere. the vendor-agnostic setup is a very important part of the open-source setup of lemmy. it's fine to build on top of that, but currently anyone with docker-compose installed can run the service and that really should be retained.
Staying cloud agnostic is very important and CDN services like cloudflare/cloudfront have inherrent privacy issues. IMO the stack should remain hostable on anyones home server environment.
I am very forgiving of the bugs I encounter on Lemmy instances because Lemmy is still growing and it's essentially still in beta. I am totally unforgiving of Reddit crashing virtually every day after almost two decades.
System load: The server is roughly at 60% cpu usage and around 25GB RAM usage. (That is, if we restart Lemmy every 30 minutes. Else memory will go to 100%)
There's a lot of momentum to move away from reddit right now, and closing registrations would be a wet blanket. Personally, I'll take the performance issues and transparency in the process over closing registrations.
Does Lemmy have the ability to replace default links?
Basically, replace signup link with one that redirects to a page that gives a very simple as possible explanation what's going on, what fediverse is and gives s list of other instances to try.
Reinforce "All are viable and can browse lemmy.world subs"... Or communities or whatever term we use here for lemmy equivalent of subreddits.
Federation-wise it would be better if new users spread out. Between clueless redditors and impossible ideal, I prefer if they at least made an account and check out what Lemmy has to offer. The curious ones will eventually settle down and even redistribute into smaller instances.
The curious ones will eventually settle down and even redistribute into smaller instances
Absolutely. I migrated from lemmy.ml when that was having too many sign-ups, and I'm not opposed to migrating from lemmy.world to help with their load. I'm sure I'm one of many
The need to restart server every so often to avoid excessive ram usage bit is very interesting to me. This sounds like some issue with memory management. Not necessarily a leak, but maybe something like server keeping unnecessary references so the object cannot be dropped.
Anyway, from my experience Rust developers love debugging such kind of problems. Are Lemmy Devs aware of this issue? And do you publish server usage logs somewhere to look deeper into that?
Not an expert, but here is where I set up a recurring donation. Apparently Mastadon.world and Lemmy.world are run by the same admins. Took me a while to understand this, please correct me if I'm wrong.
Donations definitely help. They are a real motivator and allow people to make more time for contributing. For instances it is also a way to cover hosting costs.
To all the folks that are worried, don't be. Let me tell you, Mastodon was a wreck when Musk took over Twitter and that all got sorted out within a week or so. The mods and sysadmin are obviously working hard to get things up and running, but growing pains are growing pains. To paraphrase an old adage: "Facebook wasn't built in a day." In the beginning, Zuck and Co literally limited signups to only people with college email accounts and only added universities a few domains at a time... scaling is very difficult, but it's not impossible. The way things are going, Lemmy is going to thrive!
Thank you for everything! Can we donate to cover the costs? If more people throw in $5, we all will benefit. Can Lemmy server scale up without needing RAM exponentially growing with the user number? I hope the system will get better optimized for bigger user base as the time goes on..
Same happened with mastodon.world in November. Family goes first, then work, and then all of my hobbies, of which this is one. (But the one taking up most time at the moment...)
The good thing about the fediverse is we can sign up on federated servers and still interact with everything on lemmy.world without the errors, then come back to our lemmy.world accounts when everything is smoother
I feel that lemmy runs smoothly the past few hours with very few hiccups and mostly on the upvoting and commenting side. I encountered no issues yet on the loading of the post.
I love the community here and am excited to see it grow. Thanks for giving a report, it awesome how invested y'all are and makes me want to stick with this instance even through the hardships. Keep up the good stuff!
I can't imagine how hard it is to rua server that has influx of large users. I Thank you for your hard work to run and maintain this instance. Hope it works out well and future will be a smooth sail.
Its amazing this site hasn't completely melted down yes it sucks trying to use it and having nothing load but the fact that the site has mostly worked when I want to use it and the fact you guys have less than 1% of 1% of reddits resources is mind blowing
😆 sorry about that! Baseball season is still very much on.
This issue was caused by the websockets replacing the current thread you were on with newly updated or created posts. Our game threads get updated frequently so they were constantly popping up in people's faces. We decreased the frequency of the updates pretty substantially in order to be less annoying to unrelated instances but it was still happening occasionally.
Now that we're all through with websockets it won't be an issue anymore!
I am sure the stress is unreal, but It is appreciated. You all stepped up when everyone was stepping down (or trying to sellout). I am hopeful this will turn into something great.
Thank you for all of your effort on this. Adjusting to rapid growth is a huge challenge, and we all appreciate the effort you and everyone else is putting in to trying to make this instance run smoothly.
Yep! Donating to both their Open Collective page for Mastodon.World (didn't grab that link by accident), as well as their Patreon page for Mastodon.World works!
They have a note up on Patreon that donations there also contribute to World.Lemmy, as well as another Lemmy instance!
Thanks for the transparency, and communication. I think it's always better when the userbase is able to understand what is going on rather than being left in the dark wondering what is going wrong. Keep up the good work, but also be sure you guys get enough rest, and take care of yourselves too.
Thank you for the transparency @[email protected]
It is rare for platforms to scale this quickly so issues like this are inevitable. Good luck for the troubleshooting!
Thanks for all the work you, and all the others do to welcome so many new users, and thank you for keeping us posted on your efforts to smooth things over.
From what I see the general sentiment is very positive and understanding, and it feels special to be part of a community that's more upbeat than what you see in most online places.
Thank you to you and everyone behind the scenes working hard to make Lemmy a great place. I am turkey enjoying the experience even with the bugs. Brings back a ton of nostalgia with modern mixed in.
This has been such a refreshing change from reddit! I'm willing to deal with occasional hiccups, and I know it will only get better with time. Keep it up!
I expect it is federation outbound activity growing in memory usage, it's all held in RAM for every post/comment/like going out to subscribed servers. [email protected] is a community for the focus on scaling Lemmy.
Lemmy also buffers failed posts/votes in memory, such as if there's server issues like Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml are having, to retry later.
Couple that with the server having to deal with an exponentially increasing amount of servers to federate with (since our Federation model currently links every server with every other server in a worst-case scenario), and that's probably doing bad things to the performance.
around 25GB RAM usage. (That is, if we restart Lemmy every 30 minutes. Else memory will go to 100%)
25 GB of RAM?????
Looks like your instance is the edge case with Lemmy's scalability, when there's really big amount of active users. Looks like some problems won't fade with really high-grade hardware. But I have to appreciate, that's one gargantuan job!
I’ve had instances with only a dozen or so Wordpress sites that will chew through 8gb and go into swap when certain tasks were poorly scheduled (like a couple of sites clearing their cache at the same time).
So I’m not surprised they are hitting 25gb but the gradual nature (from the sounds of it) off the memory build up does sound like a leak.
Don’t envy the devs but I’m sure some of them are enjoying it 😂
Its nice to have a place where the admins and developers aren't trying to scheme and manipulate the community to get a big payout. Thanks for all that you guys do. Curating this community is no doubt selfless hard work but we need a place like this free from the influence or potential take over by bad actors and malignant narcissists.
Amazing work team. I am already seeing improvements. Hope you are not killing yourselves though, I'm sure everyone realises how difficult it is and that it will take time to fix. We're here for the long haul! Thanks again
On reddit only reddit knows your up and down votes which are never made public unless you check an option in settings. The fediverse is already a target for brigading due to the decentralized nature, allowing bad actors to figure out who to target seems like a terrible idea. Imagine what people like /r/againsthatesubreddits would do with that info.
Keep up the great work! We believe in you! Just a reminder to everyone to help sustain lemmy.world by donating in the sidebar! If 1000 people all donated $2/month then that's 24K a year to keep the hardware running! Reddit is what happens when you rely on Corporate Overlords to provide the services you love.
All these updates are really much appreciated. I would love to see the conversations happening in this discord but I understand that you would want to limit that to only a small group: do you have someone making sure this is archived somewhere, and available in a few years? That would be a nice read then.
As a former programmer, I appreciate the hard work you folks are putting in so the rest of us can putter away our free time. You're doing great. Thank you.
That DM sending bug was already fixed in a later rc version. Although in rc.9 (and possibly rc.10) there is a weird bug where you can't sign out. Fun stuff.
Huge heartfelt thank you to everyone involved - given the huge growth you're doing awesome!
It would be great to see plans on how to grow in a controlled and safe way and plans for improving the performance. Really hope you have the funds needed and continue to have the income to support everything needed.
Again, thanks for all your hard work, and your transparency about the whole ordeal. Hopefully, the userbase in general is being patient and understanding given the situation.
I recall that previously we couldn't update jerboa due to it not being compatible with the last server version. Is that updated now, can we update Jerboa?
lemmy.world is on 0.18.1 since a couple days ago, that was the problem.
0.17->0.18 changed some APIs, and lemmy.world was sticking with 0.17 for a while due to broken stuff in 0.18, which broke Jerboa which just expects 0.18.
I really appreciate the updates. As someone in the tech field, it's been fascinating getting the inside scoop on how it's all coming together.
Edit: I made another account off of your instance to ease up on the pressure, but so many communities and users I care about are on your instance, so I'm using it too!
I hope hosting all these massive communities is enough a portfolio to land Ruud a crazy job offer one day that pays him stupid levels of money while allowing him plenty of time off to maintain these massive hobby projects.
I'm sorry to hear you're using Discord, for me it fits right in with the likes of Reddit, Twitter and Facebook.
Why not use something independant and federated like Matrix or XMPP?
I think I use all chat software there is. I'm in hundreds of Matrix rooms. But I think one of the team at least didn't like or use Matrix. Don't remember. And I have Discord anyway for the Mastodon channels..
Thanks for your hard work. Noticing janky bits getting ironed out everyday. Has anyone had any luck making Lemmy.world work in Qutebrowser? It just hangs on loading comments/posts..Any work arounds? I'd love that..working quite well in Firefox and mobile though.
Thanks for working so hard on this and keeping lemmy going. This instance seems to have become synonymous with lemmy as a whole for some of the new comers so keeping it up and running is really helping to keep the new comers on board, this can only be good for all of lemmy in the long run!
Really appreciate the transparency about what's going on behind the scenes too. It's nice to know what my donation is doing and I hope you have time for cappuccinos.
Curious about the server info. Is there more info available somewhere else?
Is lemmy.world running on a single server?
What's the CPU and memory capacity? You mentioned a percentage of CPU usage and an amount for ram, so that made me curious about what's available for each.
Does restarting take down all services or is the application clustered or not monolithic somehow?
It's a single server with 32core/64 thread AMD EPYC and 128GB RAM.
At the moment we run multiple containers for lemmy so restarting doesn't mean outage.
Thanks again for the hard work that you and the others are putting in Ruud. It can't be easy trying to patch the boat while the boat keeps growing ridiculously fast at the same time. You are very much appreciated!
Hi, am I correct that typing on iPad currently doesn’t work? As in the keypad won’t show up. I have to type in google or notepad and paste (the paste popup still works) to lemmy.world lol! Anyone else?
As always, thanks for the hard work everybody puts into this!
Hi, am I correct that typing on iPad currently doesn’t work? As in the keypad won’t show up. I have to type in google or notepad and paste (the paste popup still works) to lemmy.world lol! Anyone else?