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..

224 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!

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.

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
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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)

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
- 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.
- 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)
  
  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.
  
  Why the hell does Jerboa even limit support to 0.18? That's so stupid.
  
  Jerboa works fine with lemmy world, it just gives a warning and crashes on occasion. Not an issue to use it though.
- I read the post as needing to update to 0.18.0 before updating to 0.18.1.
  
  UI at 0.18.0 and backend at .1rc1
- For example the frontpage is no longer being constantly filled with random posts when you set the filter to "active" or "top day".
- 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
- 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!
- 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.

Thanks for all your work!
Perhaps it would be beneficial to have a temporary test instance like dev.lemmy.world or something where you dedicate a limited amount of processing power to. That way you could test the update live but not affect the main instance.
I have no idea about the specifics so that may not be doable.
- We have one! This was tested on a test instance before
  
  Cool, great minds think alike 😁
- Yeah we have a test instance, but not sure if we could test with this kind of load...
- There are already 3 test instances where devs push updates before going live, but:
  if not many people go there test, they won't catch all the bugs.
  in this specific case, admins are trying to push a new release candidate (that is not officially released yet) because some people are stuck with mobile apps that don't work anymore on the version we have now.

Oh. Good luck with the next try!

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

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

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.
  
  Wefwef.app is pretty interesting. Its browser based and so far seems more stable to me than a lot of the current Android apps. Not sure what happened, but Jerboa and the like all have become nearly completely unusable with bugs and crashes.
  Wefwef seems to unfortunately be lacking some very basic features tho.

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

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?

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! 👍
- 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
  
  I am using it to, quite nice, it still miss some quality life features, but I am they will get to it.
  
  Holy crap I just checked right now and Liftoff is on Playstore already!
- I recommend you this web app
  https://wefwef.app
  It is almost as functional as Jerboa and very impressive for a web app.
  
  Currently rate-limited by Lemmy.world, per the dev. You might get a lot of red error boxes.
  
  Already has a lot of what I liked about Apollo just in a web app, very cool!
  
  I just switched to it, Had tried jerboa, connect and liftoff and this one is by far my favorite
- 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 🥰
- Until we can get the instance updated, yeah the jerboa app doesn't really work. You could try another app, I'm using liftoff but that's harder to install, you could Google "thunder Lemmy" and try that one, I haven't tested it much but I've heard good things

@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...
  
  Well, you have at least one person who would be willing to use it ;D
  
  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.

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

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 grad I didn't write my last post during the upgrade process.
Maybe next time, give a warning, or maintenance notice.
Thanks for trying though.
- That’s just a pain point of using modern asynchrony software and will never go away

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?

Was worth a try! But yeah that was pretty bad 😬
- Yep that was terribly slow
- Agreed, it was fine at first but quickly slowed down. Thanks for all the testing and making sure it works well.
  
  You see even with a test instance it's hard to find things like these. Hard to similate this load

Sucks that lemmy.world won't be working with Jerboa when the reddit apps quit working in a couple days.
- 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.
- 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.
- Liftoff is a much better app. It's working great
  
  Thanks, seems much better!
- 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. ☺️

My current session works now with 0.18.0 + 0.18.1.rc1

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!

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

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.

pretty brutal bug ngl. was hoping I'd be using jerboa again soon
- Is the bug with Jerboa that no subscribed communities are showing up? From my point of view logged in now I only have access to lemmy.world communities
- Download v0.34 from F-droid or Obtainium, which both let you downgrade. It's compatible with Lemmy v0.17.

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

I had a weird issue after it upgraded. My browser (Firefox on Android) showed the Lemmy UI but showed no posts. I checked my profile to see if I was logged in, and it showed I was logged in as someone else! I cleared my cache and refreshed, it showed I wasn't logged in. After I logged in it was fine, and showed my expected posts and my actual profile. In Liftoff app my account worked fine the whole time, didn't need to log in again.

Running one of the largest and most vibrant Lemmy instances certainly makes this deployment a great test case for the devs and the system overall. @ruud@lemmy.world this community really appreciates you!

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.

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

thanks for your hard work ruud!

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.

Working fine from Lift-off!

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 hard work /u/ruud, we'll get there

Eveyrthing (UI) is extremely slow now. Not an improvement at all.
- Same here. Almost unuseable
- Same here. Almost unuseable

Thank you for the hard work Ruud!

In the meantime I've migrated over to Connect for Lemmy on Android, and it is working significantly better than Jerboa did.
- maybe they could partner with other app developers, so they can spend more time in the lemmy code instead of the app

~~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!

I managed to visit when the server was 0.18.1-rc. I didn’t see any posts and the selector for Subscribed, Local and All was “empty”, as in nothing was selected and I could not select anything.
- Is it OK now? There's a bug in lemmy-ui 0.18.1-rc.1 which I think you've seen

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.

Thats for all the work you're doing on this.
Just FYI, here is a different recurring issue that keeps coming back, I've strictly been using lemmy.world website, keep receiving MLB Game stats for the same day when opening random links, just happened when I opened this thread to view comments. So far if I just reload the page it will then show the correct content. But it keeps happening.

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

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.

If at first you don't succeed, try every other RC until proper :)
We have a good thing going, don't rush it, we'll wait :) and thank you for your service.

Thank you for your work!

Anyone else's home feed only loading Local > Active ?
I can't get it to load any other new/hot or subscribed/all posts unless I go to a community page and browse one community at a time.
- Jerboa?
  
  Yup

Thanks

So how does this work..is there a beta server to try it on? Or it worked in resting and it only broke with the full amount of users?
- Yes, there are three testing servers, but errors still do happen. especially when everyone is in a hurry to release

224 comments