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1y ago

[Update: Failed again] Update to 0.18.1-rc.1 tried and rolled back

We've upgraded lemmy.world to 0.18.1-rc.1 and rolled back that upgrade because of issues.

(If you had posted anything in those 10 minutes between upgrade and rollback, that post is gone. Sorry!)

The main issue we saw is that users can't login anymore. Existing sessions still worked, but new logins failed (from macos, ios and android. From linux and windows it worked)

Also new account creation didn't work.

I'll create an issue for the devs and retry once it's fixed.

Edit Contacted the devs, they tell me to try again with lemmy-ui at version 0.18.0. Will try again, brace for some downtime!

Edit 2 So we upgraded again, and it seemed to work nicely! But then it slowed down so much it was unuseable. There were many locks in the database. People reported many JSON errors. Sorry, we won't be on 0.18.1 any time soon I'm afraid..

245 comments

Thank you for the transparancy!
- I love post like this, another reason of why this instance is so good

Thanks for all your hard work @ruud@lemmy.world. It's not easy!

Both Dessalines and Nutomic have been working their butts off to get 0.18.x ready for the Reddit API changes. Huge hopes they can pull through!
Dessalines:

Nutomic:
- Yeah they've been hard at work all month. But it's also okay if things aren't ready in time. Most of the people who matter are already here.
  Maybe we will blow up soon, maybe later, but the quality of content here is sufficient to drive growth regardless of whether or not we get the prophesized huge migrations from reddit
  
  It's adequate the way it is now. They should hold off on any major upgrades until after the next batch of new users come in. Lemmy breaking during that period would be far worse then missing some updates and new features.
  
  Agreed. I'm here to stay with the content from the last couple weeks. 3 day poop embargoes alone is worth it. And recognizing users because the community is still small enough is SO different from they who shall not be named.
- Oh god, so much coffee... it's also thrilling to grasp a sense of what's going on under the hood of such big social networks at a development level (not like I could understand it, but it was very interesting to see twitter's recommendation algorithm being open-sourced)

As any engineer who does ops can tell you - you did the right thing - the solution is always to roll back, never force a roll forward, ever.
We should totally do pre and post update parties though. Even if the update fails we can have an excuse for drinks and a fun thread.
- Although since we seem to be rolling more than a ship in a storm, I think a proportion of lemmings would end up hospitalised for alcohol poisoning.

UI: 0.18.0 BE: 0.18.1-rc.1 👍
seems to be working for me, I was already logged on

is that users can’t login anymore
Ouch, that's bad :(
Thank you for your work, as always :)
- I mean that’s a Tuesday on Reddit lmao.

Just curious, why are we updating now instead of waiting for the proper 0.18.1 release?
- Because of a few things, really anoying bugs and the Jerboa app not working properly with older versions
- Reasons I can think of:
  The official Android client for lemmy, Jerboa, only supports 0.18 and later, unless users download older version from github and sideload manually.
  Sorting is broken pre 0.18, new posts keeps flowing in.
  Performance improvement by removing web socket from lemmy. (which fixes 2, which is why 1. happens)
  
  Try wefwef.app on mobile
  (no I'm not a bot account shilling I just really like the app)
  
  Jerboa works fine with lemmy world, it just gives a warning and crashes on occasion. Not an issue to use it though.
  
  Why the hell does Jerboa even limit support to 0.18? That's so stupid.
  
  The official Android client for lemmy, Jerboa, only supports 0.18 and later, unless users download older version from github and sideload manually.
  Even that won't work, because Jerboa initially tries to connect to lemmy.ml which is running 0.18, which older versions of Jerboa aren't compatible with. The app just crashes instantly without giving you the opportunity to log in to your instance.
- Federation is completely borked with .18 servers. Its very difficult for us to interact with https://lemmy.ca in any way: subscribing, upvoting, comments, posting... its all bugged.
  Its maybe not that big a deal because Lemmy.world "has the most users", so in some regards its https://lemmy.ca's loss but... we need to restore reliable federation... especially before the July 1st rush IMO.
  The .17 to .18 upgrade is basically a soft-defederation event, because of whatever this bug is between the two versions.
  
  Ah that explains it. Someone posted a cool photo to my community from lemmy.ca but didn't interact further. Looks like my comment didn't even show up on their end.
  Anyway, thanks to everyone working on the issue. I know these things aren't easy.
- I suspect there will be a large influx of new users in two days, and that having Jerboa not working on .world might cause a few issues
- For example the frontpage is no longer being constantly filled with random posts when you set the filter to "active" or "top day".
- Just curious, why are we updating now instead of waiting for the proper 0.18.1 release?
  A Release Candidate is supposed to be past beta testing already and in a state of no major bugs.
- Cause if you are on the homepage for a little bit new post start pushing the old post down and it keeps doing it. something about websockets that 18 fixes it. im assuming the admins want to get it out now so people can stop complaining about it. i get it though just wait for the 18 instead of the rc-1 but users are impatient and can't wait for sh*t!

Thanks for the transparency. Maybe it’s a good idea to have a test instance and some test cases/validation done there before updating the main instance. This is a regular process in any software/tech company/stack.
Testing should never be done directly on the prod instance.
- i think they tested it which worked fine, but it is totally different when there are users online
  
  Correct there was a test instance and that worked fine but once the live instance was upgraded everything became very slow. Can't really emulate that kind of load

Thanks for the hard work /u/ruud, we'll get there

appreciate the transparency. how are things looking in the back in lemmy.world (server wise)? will we get to a point where it wont require complete rollbacks on the state when a botched update gets rolled out?

I am glad I didn't write my last post during the upgrade process.
Maybe next time, give a warning, or maintenance notice.
Thanks for trying though.

Oh. Good luck with the next try!

@ruud@lemmy.world just wondering if you have considered setting up a second, beta, instance of lemmy.world open to the public?
With all the performance issues with 0.18.1, it's highlighted that there needs to be a way to stress test these updates before applying them to the main instance.
- Yes, considering that. But we'll need people to use that when we will do testing...
  
  I'm not familiar with what the server architecture looks like, but is there a possibility of using a load balancer in front of the instance's server and swapping a "beta" server into the load balancer when you need to do testing? You could basically migrate your traffic with zero downtime, assuming Lemmy's architecture allows for it.
  
  Well, you have at least one person who would be willing to use it ;D
- Is there a way to have two instances writing to the same db? That'd help a lot in this situation so the test instance can still be accessing the same data as the stable instance. Otherwise we'll never have enough load to fully stress test and be in the same situation as the three existing Lemmy test instances.
  
  Seeing that with these updates often come with changes to the database as well, that could be very difficult if not impossible.

Linux/Firefox After upgrade many things didn't work, but they continued not to work after rollback.
Turns out I needed to clear the cache, then everything worked fine again.

Eveyrthing (UI) is extremely slow now. Not an improvement at all.

Jerboa is almost unusable for me at the moment. A lot of crashes, pages not loading, messages not sending etc. But I know that's inevitable at times. Restarting my phone seemed to make it worse. But I know you guys are on it! 👍
- I recommend you this web app
  https://wefwef.app
  It is almost as functional as Jerboa and very impressive for a web app.
  
  I just switched to it, Had tried jerboa, connect and liftoff and this one is by far my favorite
  
  Already has a lot of what I liked about Apollo just in a web app, very cool!
- Liftoff is a much better app. I used Jerboa as well but found an alternative cuz it was pretty much unusable. Just dowload Liftoff's latest apk and install
- How did you install it? I was using the app through the Google Playstore and for some reason the app was really unstable and buggy. I ended up installing the app from F-Droid and it is drastically better and much more stable.

I'm so new, I'm a baby, I have no idea what I'm doing. I did just create my account, I tried using the app but it wouldn't let me. Saying server version too low. I'm sorry for my ignorance, but is this what that means? And this means we can't use the app yet right?
Also, thank you for all of this. I will be here for it all, I'm staying forever! I already love this so much more than anything else 🥰

Jerboa crashes constantly for me now, doesn't even let me view anything. JSYK!
- You might want to try https://wefwef.app
- There's a fix the dev has just released. See reviews section on the app. He said it'll take a few hours to show in the playstore.
  
  This is good news! I haven't been able to try Jerboa fully yet since I use lemmy.world. I'm not seeing this review section you're talking about but I'll be on the lookout for an update. Thanks for sharing!

Dude I posted the funniest comment in those 10 minutes but you all must have missed it. Oh well 😅

Seems 0.18 is up... and...
OH NO ! The interface changed ! Bring it back ! Bring it back... /s
Just kidding... It's looking good, so it's time to explore a little and find all the new stuff.
Nice work @Rudd, thanks for all the hard work.

I am glad y'all rolled back. I had just enabled 2FA and could not login to my account. Rolling back removed 2FA so I was able to log back in. Thanks.
- Which 2FA app did you use? I heard Authy didn't work
  
  Aegis

My current session works now with 0.18.0 + 0.18.1.rc1

Was worth a try! But yeah that was pretty bad 😬
- Yep that was terribly slow

Thanks for the info. You're doing a great job!

Suddenly my Jerboa won't change from local and I can't change the sort. Not sure if this is related, but it was working fine yesterday after I updated the app. But no longer this morning.
- What you're describing is an issue introduced with Jerboa 0.0.36-alpha and has been fixed in today released 0.0.37-alpha.
- Mine randomly quit working a few days ago. All I get is a blank screen. I've switched to the website for now, though I need to look into the other app options. There are a couple more now.

I’ve found from hopping around some other instances that have upgraded to 0.18 that it is still pretty buggy. It does seem to be giving more information about the errors, instead of just failing like in 0.17, but spend any time browsing on those instances and you’re bound to be inundated with JSON and query errors. It also seems to get worse the longer you browse.
The UI changes are nice, and I do appreciate not having my feed auto-updating constantly, but I think you’d be making the right choice to hold off on upgrading until they can iron 0.18.1 out all the way. I’m not super knowledgeable about TS and Rust, but as a user it seems that switching from WebSocket created/shined a light on Lemmy’s issues with caching in general.
- but as a user it seems that switching from WebSocket created/shined a light on Lemmy’s issues with caching in general.
  Or just adding actual error messages instead of ignoring them and throwing up a spinning wheel.

- That doesn't make sense. Of course you can fail. Stop filling the boy's head with this nonsense.

Looks like we're still having issues, more's the pity.
Do we know what's causing the issue, or is it still a bit of a mystery for the time being?

Is there any place that people can assist in trying to figure out issues?
- Well you can either help the devs via their Github, or if you wanna help sysadmin the server I can send you a link to our Discord.
  
  Thanks for the response, Going to look into the github/code side but I may reach out in the near future to help where needed. 😀

PSA: If you've been using lemmy.world during the upgrades and rollbacks your browser might've cashed some stuff that quickly got out of date. If you have problems (especially JSON errors), try doing a hard refresh (usually Ctrl + F5) on the site. It might log you out.

Good luck! May the software gods bless you with a functioning website with minimal bugs!

~~RC2~~ RC4 was just released, here's hoping it solves the issues you were experiencing with performance of RC1!
- I thought RC3 was just released?
  
  Dang! They're moving fast!

Damn, Im glad you tried, and thanks for the update! I just really want the front page fixed without changing to page 0 lol. That and the 3/6/12 hour filter option.
Keep us updated. Im bouncing back and forth between LW, KBIN, and .ml for now though
any recommendations on other instances I should try outside the lemmy-verse and kbin-verse?

Great! I'm getting a bug, when I upvote a comment or post, the "loading animation" takes forever to complete. If I refresh the upvote is there. It reminds me to the bug we had with comments and new posts.
Edit: Is the same for comments.

Thanks for the update! (I mean the communication regarding the update) 0.18 moved away web sockets right? Maybe that leads to different DB access patterns causing locks on such a big instance as lemmy.world.
- That was indeed what happened.

Sucks that lemmy.world won't be working with Jerboa when the reddit apps quit working in a couple days.
- Jerboa still works fine with lemmy.world. It pops up a warning that the server version is unsupported, but it still seems to work fine.
  
  After I get the warning I can tap the hamburger menu and it shows my account name up top but when I try to upvote a post it states I need to log in.
- Liftoff is a much better app. It's working great
  
  Thanks, seems much better!
- alternatives like LiftOff is available
  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.liftoffapp.liftoff&pli=1
  
  It's available from play store now? Awesome! Will definitely try out.
- On the plus side, I'm about to open the beta that handles both just fine (plus a lot of features no one else is doing yet). The deadline I for myself is Saturday when the Reddit clients go down.
  Unfortunately it was built by someone who lurks and comments, and I realized even though merging feeds from accounts on different servers is going to be awesome, other people like to post and I need to stop getting off track
  The stress of the timeline is starting to get to me and I'm terrified no one is going to give it a chance, but I've fixed most of the things that drove me nuts in jerboa... That should count for something, right?
  
  Hol up, are you soft announcing the development of a new Jerboa-based app? What's it called? Good luck to you! I hope you achieve your goals with the project and that is well received. ☺️
- It will work, I'm using it. Just ignore the warning message

Working fine from Lift-off!

It seems that my Hot feed has been stuck for the last day or two.

Im already in lemmy 0.19.0
this comment is from the future
- How is it?
  
  Replies don’t work

I want to upvote, but I get this instead.
- Oh man, for a sec there you made me thing I was getting errors 😅

Thank you for your work!

thanks for your hard work ruud!

Hello Lemmy World

I’ve tried to sign up for days and still cannot. The thing just spins after the code. I had to sign up with Lem.ee

What changes does the new release candidate offer?
- 0.18 is where they have swapped WebSocket for HTTP, as well as tried to fix a load of bugs related to using WebSockets (like the new posts pushing the main feeds down).
  0.18.1 is meant to re-enable CAPTCHA on signups, which was removed in 0.18.

Thank you for all your efforts.

In the meantime I've migrated over to Connect for Lemmy on Android, and it is working significantly better than Jerboa did.

Thank you for the hard work Ruud!

The improvements are awesome, great to see it sorted out before Reddit cuts off API access.
I just occasionally see error message popups for JSON syntax errors.

Could you upgrade to 0.18.0? The android app doesn't work with 0.17, but it seems to work with 0.18.0
- 0.18.0 removes Captcha support. Upgrading would make a lot easier for bots to join.
  
  Thanks for the clarification. Gonna wait then, I guess
  
  Just disable new registrations. Nobody is going to want to join the instance in this state anyway.

@Edit 2: Especially ironic since improved performance was supposed to be one of the selling points.

245 comments