How much money does Lemmy.ml need to temporarily boost their servers?
With forewarning about a huge influx of users, you knowLemmy.ml will go down. Even if people go to https://join-lemmy.org/instances and disperse among the great instances there, the servers will go down.
Ruqqus had this issue too. Every time there was a mass exodus from Reddit, Ruqqus would go down, and hardly reap the rewards.
Even if it's not sustainable, just for one month, I'd like to see Lemmy.ml drastically boost their server power. If we can raise money as a community, what kind of server could we get for 100$? 500$? 1,000$?
The site currently runs on the biggest VPS which is available on OVH. Upgrading further would probably require migrating to a dedicated server, which would mean some downtime. Im not sure if its worth the trouble, anyway the site will go down sooner or later if millions of Reddit users try to join.
There will either be an hour of downtime to migrate and grow or days of downtime to fizzle.
I love that there's an influx of volunteers, including SQL experts, to mitigate scaling issues for the entire fediverse but those improvements won't be ready in time. Things are overloading already and there's less than a week before things increase 1,000-fold, maybe more.
Is it running in a single docker container or is it spread out across multiple containers? Maybe with docker-machine or kubernetes with horizontal scaling, it could absorb users without issue - well, except maybe cost. OVH has managed kubernetes.
No, thats the 8 GB memory option... if its the biggest, it should be around 112 €. Meanwhile i keep wondering if i should let Lemmy stay on the current KVM (which is similarely specked but with dedicated cores and stuff) or if it is better to move it to one of my dedis just in case... well... will see xD
Do you have the frontend a DB serving in the same VPS? If so it would be a great time to split them. Likewise if you DB is running in a VPS, you're likely suffering from significant steal from the hypervisor so you would benefit from switching to a dedicated box. My API calls saw a speedup of 10x just from switching from a VPS DB to a Dedicated Box DB.
I just checked OVH VPS offers and they're shit! Even at 70 Eur dedicated on hetzner, you would gain more than double those resources without steal. I would recommend switching your DB ASAP for immediate massive gains.
If you're wondering why you should listen to me, I built and run https://aihorde.net and are handling about 5K concurrent connections currently.
Hetzner is very strict about piracy so thats not an option. And now is almost weekend so I wont have time for a migration. Anyway there are plenty of other instances in case lemmy.ml goes down.
Edit: I also wouldnt know which size of dedicated server to choose. No matter what I pick, it will get overloaded again after a week or two.
I'm in the processing of closing on a house/moving so i don't have a ton of extra money or time laying around, but I work in tech as a junior Linux admin with some experience with some big data tech (HDFS, some Spark, Python, etc).
Good question. Seeing as your set of skills don't quite align with Lemmy's core componentes (Rust backend and Inferno frontend), your best bet would probably be on helping new people settle in, improving documentation, translations, discussing new ideas (like for onboarding), etc.
I only know enough code to break things, but I wouldn't mind working on some documentation - I'll go read what Lemmy needs; thanks for reminding me that anyone can chip in.
Based on looking at the code and the relatively small size of the data, I think there may be fundamental scaling issues with the site architecture. Software development may be far more critical than hardware at this point.
What are you seeing in the code that makes it hard do scale horizontally? I've never looked at Lemmy before, but I've done the steps of (monolithic app) -> docker -> make app stateless -> Kubernetes before and as a user, I don't necessarily see the complexity (not saying it's not there, but wondering what specifically in the site architecture prevents this transition)
Right now it looks to me like Lemmy is built all around live real-time data queries of the SQL database. This may work when there are 100 postings a day and an active posting gets 80 comments... but it likely doesn't scale very well. You tend to have to evolve to a queue system where things like comments and votes are merged into the main database in more of a batch process (Reddit does this, you will see on their status page that comments and votes have different uptime tracking than the main website).
On the output side, it seems ideal to have all data live and up to the very instant, but it can fall over under load surges (which may be a popular topic, not just an influx from the decline of Twitter or Reddit). To scale, you tend to have to make some compromises and reuse output. Some kind of intermediate layer such as every 10 seconds only regenerate the output page if there has been a new write (vote or comment change).
don’t necessarily see the complexity (not saying it’s not there
It's the lack of complexity that's kind of the problem. Doing direct SQL queries gets you the latest data, but it becomes a big bottleneck. Again, what might have seemed to work fine when there were only 5000 postings and 100,000 total comments in the database can start to seriously fall over when you have reached the point of accumulating 1000 times that.
I'm also willing to donate to other instances too - Beehaw, Sopuli, Lemmygrad, Lemmyone - Anything so we can have better shock absorption. If you run one of those instances, please reply and let us know how much you think you need
At the moment, I run lemmy.world using the funding of mastodon.world.
If Lemmy.world might grow and need a dedicated server, I'll try to raise funds for it separately (or create a larger .world fundraiser as I have other instances as well)
What if a bunch of groups from the Fediverse hosted a huge fundraiser and distributed the funds to where they were needed? Maybe even kept a bank of funds for when large, temporary influxes of funding are needed.
What kind of server and which specs is lemmy.world running on? I'm planning on setting up my own instance for a small community, but I have no idea what to brace for.
Yes you can :)
There are no stupid question, we're not accostumed to these kind of structures for social networks so it's very normal to have them. I can suggest some video like this to understand better how federation works
Currently, I believe Mastodon/Misskey/Calckey/Akkoma/Friendica users can post and reply to Lemmy groups/communities. There doesn't seem to be a way to follow them from Lemmy, though.
I think you might be able to follow Friendica groups, though.
And kbin and Lemmy have a lot of interoperability.
But is it possible to use the Lemmy UI with a Mastodon account? I can subscribe to Lemmy communities from within Mastodon, but it's a very different user experience. Everything is just sorted by date, comments are not well threaded, etc.
Do I just need an account on a lemmy instance if I want a more reddit-like experience for that content?
I'm in the process of setting up a raspberry pi to host an instance, but the documentation is not super helpful. I'll slog through it and issue a PR once co.plete so others may not have the same issues.