[Done] Lemmy world was upgraded to 0.18.3 today (2023-07-30)
Update
The upgrade was done, DB migrations took around 5 minutes. We'll keep an eye out for (new) issues but for now it seems to be OK.
Original message
We will upgrade lemmy.world to 0.18.3 today at 20:00 UTC+2 (Check what this isn in your timezone). Expect the site to be down for a few minutes. ""Edit"" I was warned it could be more than a few minutes. The database update might even take 30 minutes or longer.
Fwiw, it can be helpful to call out the date for such changes. Preferably in YYYY-MM-DD (ISO 8601).
While it's helpful to link to an off-site timezone converter tool (thanks for that, btw), "today" can be a different date, depending on where in the world you are. For example, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.
Minor suggestion: write your time zones like UTC+2 and not CEST. I'm pretty sure most people outside Europe don't know what the time zone CEST is. Yes, you provided a link that helpfully converts the time to the users' local time zone, but sometimes it's nicer to be able to know something without having to click into a link.
This version brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%.
Is it me or is the 80% figure just insane? Are there any benchmarks to see how fast this has become versus say Lemmy 0.18.2 on a very large instance?
Not really, you'd be surprised how often systems are bloated all because of a single option, character, etc. Most developers don't start optimizing until much later in the software's lifecycle. Often enough, it is easily overlooked. That's why code reviews are needed often with fresh pair of eyes.
Just to set the expectations, reducing database size or CPU usage does not necessarily mean it is faster but it does mean there's more free capacity on the servers to handle more users at the same performance.
More importantly; they may help reduce costs on the smaller indie instances that doesn't need to buy larger server instances.
Hopefully, we'll continue to see more of these optimizations.
I believe if the backend doesn't have to write as much data then you'll have less I/O operations so it should IMO have an impact on the overall speed of Lemmy (unless all of those operations are done asynchronously). Same for the reduced CPU usage, it could allow for more stuff in parallel.
Funnily enough, this is the feature that can speed up the performance by doing less calls:
The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.
Infinite scroll and word filtering. If I see one more post about "AI", Musk, Twitter, or fake superconductors, I might have to get off the computer for 10 whole minutes.
Why are these announcements the only place I am finding out the Lemmy has an update? I figured there would be more top level discussions about it on Lemmy. Maybe I am just not following the correct communities.
Each server admin decides how to publish announcements, some have a mastodon account, some have a separate website, some might post on a different Lemmy server, like [email protected], someone would likely post up there after the fact if the server is down for a while without apparent explanation.
Awesome! It’s great to see thing become snappier and better since I joined Lemmy.
Reddit would almost never update unless it was a pants on fire situation or they would force feed features that no one wanted or even was tested properly.
A big thank you to everyone involved, FROM those taking the time to submit bug descriptions in a reproducible manner and those making feature requests or those simply upvoting and pointing out the most needed patch/updates TO simultaneously amateur, newly minted coders and veteran developpers pushing small and big patches to fix anything from typos, reformatting old code, cleaning almost unnoticeable UI object, transition less performing backend modules or secure/harden of all these moving parts.
I am glad to witness and be a part of the perpetual progress of the fediverse.
I'm curious about this as well. I've looked into Firefish a bit and it looks interesting, but I can't seem to follow Lemmy communities from the flagship instance Firefish.Social.
This version brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%. Special thanks to @phiresky for their work on DB optimizations.
The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.
In terms of security, Lemmy now performs HTML sanitization on all messages which are submitted through the API or received via federation. Together with the tightened content-security-policy from 0.18.2, cross-site scripting attacks are now much more difficult.
All the 10s of posts about this already and you think he's going to say "oh, didn't think about this, good idea". Or you know it's something that they have already made a call on and you're just badgering and harassing them over it?
I cannot stand the tankies, but I prefer them to folk like you. I'm yet to see anothing from lemmygrad in a month on lemmy, so get over it and block it if you see it and don't want to.