Feddit UK slow or broken at updating "hot" or "active"
I have an account on feddit.uk and lemmy.world with almost identical subscriptions.
When I visit the feddit.uk homepage and look at posts from my subscriptions sorted by "hot", the two posts immediately after the two pinned Feddit UK posts at the top are 6 days old. The behaviour with "active" is similar. Posts shown are quite old, and neither hot nor active.
When I visit the lemmy.world homepage and look at the "hot" posts from my subscriptions, the first 10 are all with the last couple of hours. Active shows posts in the last 24 hours with a healthly number of comments.
Both servers are running 0.17.4
Basically, right now feddit.uk is almost unusable for me due to both hot and active being populated by stale posts. I need to search by "new" to get anything approaching useful - but when I do that there is just too much to sift through.
I've also noticed that when I leave the front page open in subscribed view I occasionally get a sudden flood of posts appearing, they're always from remote instances and normally older posts (sometimes a few days old).
It kinda looks like they're only just being received by our instance at that point, although I'm not familiar enough with Lemmy to say thats 100% whats happening. But if we're not reliably receiving posts then that could explain why the front page content is stale.
I think you're right, but the fact that lemmy.world appears to work and is also on 0.17.4, may imply an additional issue (although I appreciate the problem not occuring there may simply be because it's not 100% reproducible).
Not sure if it helps but these are the first 4 "hot" posts I can see after the two pinned ones:
Although a day or less old. So that seems to be working as intended for me. I do know "active" is an issue that 1.8 is designed to address. No ideal why lemmy.world doesn't have those problems.
I was reluctant to upgrade to v18.0 because it didn't have captcha but I've decided to upgrade it anyway and close the registration to of the instance behind a question to avoid spam instead
I've been unable to sign up, just get the sign up button spinning. Hopefully with future updates it will get fixed because I really like the idea of a good uk instance.
Could it be something to do with lemmy.world's federation skewing the votes/comments? The other thing is whether the ranking is cached in some way and that's broken or not invalidating early enough. Don't know.
I reckon something is just broken (at least for me). This post about lettuce has been my top hot post for days both on the web and via two different apps..
So, could be to do with that. If the server is underprovisioned, maybe it's taking an overly long time to run each calculation and everything is being held up. Complete speculation, though, at this point. 🤷
Edit: this is actually the 1.8 version of the code. Prior to this it looks like this was being done differently (see: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/2952/files). So like Emperor says, it looks some optimization work was done here as presumably the queries were running too slowly.
@[email protected] Any idea if there's anything that you can do about it? It does make the place pretty difficult to use and enjoy. I'd like to keep this as my main Lemmy account, but at the moment the other big instances are much more usable due to the functioning feed sorts.
My top 13 results in All > Hot are currently all 10 days old...
Edit: It's getting worse. My top 5 post on All > Hot is 2 years old with a zero score and two comments.
Thanks Tom. I think Lemmy's "hot" sorting is still bums, but that's not feddit.uk's fault. I posit that posts with no comments should not be considered "hot"!
@[email protected] Hey Tom. This issue is persisting for me. I get the odd post that I would consider hot, but in general the posts are days, weeks or in a couple of cases YEARS old! I have accounts on two other instances with similar subscriptions to those I have here:
lemmy.world doesn't have this issue (although it has many other issues and is generally unusable, I think due to load). They are on UI: 0.18.1-rc.7
programming.dev is also on BE: 0.18.0 and seems fine. No issues with hot posts. They have about twice the number of users/posts as feddit.uk.
Stranger and stranger... these are my "hots". They start off okay, and then quickly they are a year+ old. Happens on all clients. I'm probably going to create a new username/account and see if it's the same. Maybe something has got stale with this one. Besides, I don't like my username anymore! :)
Not being updated to 0.18.0 is fine though. Lemmy.world is still on 0.17.4, as are many others. 0.18.0 doesn't have Captcha which had to be enabled on feddit.uk last week due to a flooding of bot registrations. Apparently it's retuning in 0.18.1.
However, sadly I'm finding it unusable right now with the sorting, so I'm mostly on lemmy.world ☹️