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2y ago

[Done] Server will be migrated (More power!)

So after we've extended the virtual cloud server twice, we're at the max for the current configuration. And with this crazy growth (almost 12k users!!) even now the server is more and more reaching capacity.

Therefore I decided to order a dedicated server. Same one as used for mastodon.world.

So the bad news... we will need some downtime. Hopefully, not too much. I will prepare the new server, copy (rsync) stuff over, stop Lemmy, do last rsync and change the DNS. If all goes well it would take maybe 10 minutes downtime, 30 at most. (With mastodon.world it took 20 minutes, mainly because of a typo :-) )

For those who would like to donate, to cover server costs, you can do so at our OpenCollective or Patreon

Thanks!

Update The server was migrated. It took around 4 minutes downtime. For those who asked, it now uses a dedicated server with a AMD EPYC 7502P 32 Cores "Rome" CPU and 128GB RAM. Should be enough for now.

I will be tuning the database a bit, so that should give some extra seconds of downtime, but just refresh and it's back. After that I'll investigate further to the cause of the slow posting. Thanks @veroxii@lemmy.world for assisting with that.

354 comments

Wow that was fast.
- I will add, joking aside, that Ruud is doing a bloody good job (sorry, I don't know yet how to tag a user).
  
  Didn't realise you could respond with images on lemmy. Smoother jokes than r***it...
- When a volunteer can run a server better then a big tech company
  unsurprising pikachu face
  
  To be fair the volunteer isn't trying to squeeze value out of the users to inflate his IPO.

Like many others, I came from Reddit and was initially hesitant to try it out, but I love this place so much! It really feels like the "worse" parts of Reddit have been skimmed off, and that definitely shows with how nice people seem here! Thank you so much!
- how nice people seem here
  yes! I love the culture of this place so far
- Truth is for me as someone who used Reddit for about the last 16 years, it very much feels like the early days of Reddit again.
  Which is a very good thing, because that's what I originally signed up for compared to a metric fuckton of karma farming spam bots.
  I just hope it gains enough traction to be sustainable in the long run, especially considering that it's relying on donations for funding, I believe?
  
  undefined> metric fuckton of karma farming spam bots.
  People are hard at work writing bots for lemmy so don't worry, you'll be able to enjoy your regular hogwash again really soon.
  Personally I think lemmy should go as far out of its way as possible to make bots in any and all forms just about impossible.
- Found one russian troll already. Oh well..
  Edit: lol, was not referring to OP, it was some world news post comment with chiese username that spread misinformation about russian war in ukraine. I just added my thoughts on the community.
  
  you can easily block any user by click on the 🚫 sign under their comment, and never have to deal with their bs again
  
  Lesson learned today: never take anything for granted—if there's a chance to be massively misunderstood, it will eventually happen lol
  
  What.
  
  what about that post made you think they were a russian troll?

So, I just want to make sure I understand this as I am a new user from reddit. Instances are server based and cost money. Instances are Lemmy.World, Beebaw, Lemmy.Film, etc etc. These are all seperate hosted instances. Correct?
And donations would help pay for the server, ie lemmy.world?
- I'm a newbie from Reddit too, but your understanding matches mine.
- Yes, lemmy.world, lemmy.film, beebaw and etc are other instances of Lemmy and users from other instances can interact with other instances.
  And yes donations help the server afloat.
  Pretty cool stuff.
  
  Awesome, thank you for this information. I hope you have a great week!
- That is correct. I've signed up for monthly donations to help cover costs (as well as added tip to help the admins themselves).
- "Lemmy instances" are analogous to "email servers": your account is hosted on one of them, but you can communicate with people on other ones, because the servers know how to talk to each other.
  Expanding the capacity of the Lemmy service will involve both (1) more instances, and (2) more resources for existing instances.

For less tech-savvy newbies (like me), in case there is some confusion affecting your urge to engage/donate... My friend gave me a great explanation:
Lemmy the platform is planet Earth
“Instances” like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc. are like the different countries on Earth
When someone signs up, the user picks one instance to be a part of, like how an Earthling becomes a citizen of a country
If you register at lemmy.world, that means your home instance/ “home country” is lemmy.world, but you can “travel” to lemmy.ml, another instance / “country”, to check out and subscribe to their community
When you subscribe to a different instance that’s not your home instance, you can still participate in their content, and other people will be able to see which instance / “country” you’re from
Each instance can have its own version of the same “subreddit”, so you can have a c/Memes in your home instance that is different from a c/Memes in another instance. But you can subscribe to both separately
c/[community name] is the naming convention used here I think like r/[subreddit name] on Reddit. If talking about a community in a different instance, it's c/[community name]@[instance name] so like c/memes@lemmy.ml
Donations will help with the cost of running lemmy.world only and not lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.
Someone please correct any of this if any of it is wrong, I’ll happily edit
- To add to this, you can use exclamation point "!" To link people to communities in a way that won't take them away from their home instance. Likewise you can use @ for users.
  Example: !eli5@lemmy.blahaj.zone Or: @Soullioness@lemmy.world
  It even auto fills when you type
  Edit: might be wrong about it linking universally.
  
  This absolutely is not true today, they create links that are absolute and refer to the host of the community in question.
- This seems like a much better explanation for Lemmy compared to the email analogy everyone writes for non-tech savvy people.
  
  Welp, tbh the dude is a pro at making a molehill out of a mountain
- Is there a way to view C/Memes in all instances at once in aggregate? I don't want to miss out on what other instances are doing.
  
  Not yet, although there is ongoing discussion about this
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818

I'm not sure how its being done as far as the technical aspects but Ruud has done a great job as admin upgrading the servers to keep up and anticipating the flow of new users.
The same admin also has experience with a mastadon.world server that experienced lots of growth from Twitter users leaving over musk moves. So essentially we have a good admin as far as I can tell and it's not his first rodeo. Part of the reason I chose this server
- I'm less concerned with the technical aspects and more curious about the long term.
  Federated instances, such as lemmy.world, are operated by individuals; What happens if they decide to stop doing so without handing the server/data off to someone else? Do all of our accounts created here disappear? What do other users see if they click through my profile from a post on a different federated server? What happens to all of the content created on the server in question?
  
  It would be gone.
  The federated design has got people already thinking about it though. It's inevitable that some instances will just close without notice. So people are trying to figure out the best way to handle it, from archiving/mirroring to creating an export account feature.

12k ??? That's crazy! It was only 500 when I joined 6 days ago, wow!
No worries for the downtime, when it's needed, it's needed :)
- probably mostly due to the reddit situation. at least thats why im here now
  
  May Reddit crash and burn. I'm part of the reddit exodus and the look of Lemmy is close to what I used to get in RedditIsFun (RiF). Going to take some getting used to but so far so good.

I’m glad to hear about the new users (I myself am one.) and the server upgrades!
I think lemmy.world suits me better than Beehaw. (great folks over there, no shade)
I like that lemmy.world let’s communities be openly created by users, as well as the inclusion of downvoting which I personally prefer.
- I’m using Fedia. How do I add lemmy.world so I can see posts from there?

Just curious, what sort of hardware is lemmy.world using/moving to? Wondering if there's a good way to predict load based on number of users.
- Yes. It’s called performance testing. Basically an engineer would need to setup test user transactions to simulate live traffic and load test the system to see how everything scales, where it breaks, etc. Then you can use the results of the tests to figure out how big of an instance you should use for your projected number of users.
  Jmeter, and locust.io are the two biggest open source performance test tools.
  The alternative is take a wild guess. See how the system behaves, and make adjustments in real time… like what @ruud@lemmy.world is currently doing.
  
  Worth noting that typical app scaling does not scale linearly, and hardware caps out at some point (with diminishing returns up to that point) - federation will help with that much cheaper where normally a company would just have to throw more money at more servers themselves :)
  
  Yeah, I meant specific data using lemmy.world as a datum, not the theoretical "check and see if you guessed right" method.

Lemmy.world is fantastic, thanks for your efforts. It fit perfectly with all the criteria I had when choosing where to host my account.
That being said, I wish Lemmy.ml, the "main" Lemmy instance, more often registered communities created here. At the moment, most people just search for communities there and many of our own don't show up because no user from that instance interacted with our new and growing communities just yet - not only does this create a fragmentation issue, but given the massive load spike, Lemmy.ml is actually running a bit slow whereas Lemmy.world is handling posts better, making interaction easier specially when migrating users from Reddit or other places. For instance, my GameBoy community is ready, with users, and I'm about to post some good content - but as far as someone from Lemmy.ml is concerned, no such community exists.
- My take on this is that we have to remember how much this massive influx of users has been the last few days. Significantly more than its entire history. There is also the learning curve of new users. I think as people start getting a handle on how the fediverse works this will be less of an issue. Overtime this should work itself out. My two cents anyway. BTW also just subbed to c/Gameboy ;)
- Well, when I search for a community, the results span servers, so I can find and join wherever. It is possible the search feature only includes servers previously referenced, I don't know.
  
  If no one has joined that community before you need to search it with the format !community@instance

What's the operating cost? Thank you, for running this server! :)
- The cheapest configuration for that server on Hetzner is about €150 per month.
  
  Honestly cheaper than I would have expected. However, still a nice chunk of money to shell out for a community, and for that, I commend.
- Tree fiddy
  
  Damn lock ness monster
  
  I gave him a dollar

Awesome to see so much growth. I just joined yesterday and I guess I'm not alone!

I really appreciate what you're doing, but I'm worried how this instance will continue scaling. What happens when it gets to 1 million users? 10 million? We can scale vertically only somewhat, but horizontal scaling seems to be limited to "just join a new instance 4head" and that just...doesn't have a good experience.
- This server can easily host 1M users.
  Most stress on the server comes from all the signups and newcomers posting a lot. After a while that becomes less. On Mastodon, the first days in November I had over 100k active users. Now I have 165k accounts but around 32k active.
  And I'm sure the Lemmy devs will also improve the performance of the site. They never really had to, a few days ago the total number of Lemmy users over all instances was 7k.
  
  Is data actually replicated among the different servers? Is (data from other servers) just cached temporarily or is it permanently stored on local DBs?
  I checked lemmy docs but I couldn't find a clear answer.
  I was wondering what kind of strain the immense influx of people could put on network and DBs other than just servers, specifically in case of the number of servers raising a lot, not just users on a single server.
- Ya what are the limitations with scaling horizontally? Scaling up is a stop gap.
  Ruud, thank you for your investment here though.

I'm not an engineer or a dev - but requiring a 32-core, $2000+ CPU to support 12k users doesn't seem like it would scale well. Is this normal, or does the fediverse require more computational resources than a simpler setup like reddit? How would a fediverse instance with 100k users be maintained?
- Look at the pricing!
  Hetzner wants 150€ for this server. 3TB disk is 50€ extra. So 200€ for the server per month. This is also about 200$ so 1.6¢ per user and month. This should be very manageable.
  Also it doesn't mean the server only holds 12k users. If the server holds 20k users or more you Look at less than a Cent cost per user and month.
  They are already raising 600€ per month via Patron only so 3 months worth per month. If the server gets bigger, more people will probably give money and while it stays a kinda hobby project it should work out fine.
  But you are right with something else:
  Lemmy currently has no ability to loadbalance over multiple servers for one instance. This will become a Problem in the future, but it is being worked at.
- Reddit is not a "simpler setup". Reddit has gigantic amounts of computational resources to throw at things. Resources that make servers like this look like a Raspberry Pi. They're just much less transparent about how the backend works and what they have.
- Was thinking the same thing, is a lemmy instance supposed to be literally a single server instance?
  
  I'm also interested in the answer to this question.

do you plan to publish any of your scaling data? Some others might consider helping by running large instances and your learnings would be incredibly helpful.
- Yes, when I get around to it I can create a post about it. And of course, feel free to ask.
  
  if you had any basic numbers easily accessible like iops peak and average or screen shots of your dashboard showing resource utilization would do wonders. Right now you are getting slammed but are operational (barely) you have the upper bound config for a 12k user system at least right now ;-)

King Ruud is good to us

Went ahead and subbed on patreon. Hope that lemmy survives the growing pains and can develop some of the community that reddit had!
Also if there are any fellow former apollo users would def recommend checking out Mlem, its in testflight right now but seems to be working towards the experience that apollo gave on reddit.
- I’ll give it a shot! Edit: love the fact that click to collapse is back. No search bar, account info and the occasional crash but the feed looks great! Looking forward to future updates
  
  Yeah, have still ran into a few bugs but definitely moving in the right direction.
- iOS only? Or also Android? Btw, you receive notifications on Jerboa? What do you use for Lemmy on Android?
  
  Only on iOS, but afaik there are a few options on android atm.

Performance is looking awesome, lemmy.world is responding very fast to community subscription requests and search is also very fast. My experience when using other instances was that search didn't work at all, hindering community discovery.
Thanks!
- This is how I understand it: a current limitation (feature?) Is that you can only search from your instance to other communities if someone from your instance has interacted with it. But if you use https://browse.feddit.de/ you can search across all instances. Then subscribe to it, or search the whole url in your own instances search. Once an instance interacts with another, now other people from your instance can search for it by simple name.
  
  Oh, so it is due to the larger userbase here! There is a larger chance that someone already subscribed to a community I am looking for.
  Still, when I was using another instance, subscribing to communities at lemmy.world was instantaneous while subbing to communities at beehaw.org or lemmy.ml often took more than one try.
  It also doesn't help that lemmy.ml where a lot of users migrated at first seems to be having issues right now.
  Also on jerboa searching for communities by url doesn't seem to be working.
  Hopefully the influx of new users and attention helps improving and ironing some issues like it happened with mastodon.
  
  So, mostly correct. Lemme clarify:
  If you do a URL search in the communities page (with all settings set to "All", even "Communities"), your instance will pull in a few of the latest posts and comments. Not anything too heavy, just enough to give you an idea of what's going on.
  The moment a single user on your instance subscribes, your instance will start pulling in everything from that community. If every instance pulled in every community from every other instance, the network would be very vulnerable to a botspam instance that goes up would crash everything. Much better for an instance to only pull in communities that people are interested in.

Umm I joined at 2k users now there are over 15k. Damn this is exploding.
- Maybe Reddit signed a little death sentence with APIpocalypse. Elon did same shit and Twitter actions in stock market dropped a lot! (even more than with adquisition). Reddit wants go to stock market soon.
  Bad move u/spez and Reddit staff!
- Loving it more and more each day :)

Thanks for hosting a great community!

We are growing too powerful!

Would be awesome if you create some group chat (e.g. Discord?) and add sysadmins/devops to it. Would be more than happy to assist, especially if you have questions or need opinions.
I've been working as sre/sysadmin/devops for the past ~5 years and ~9 years of (Arch) Linux user. More than 1K Arch Wiki edits over that period of time.
- Good idea!
  
  I might be interested in helping, DevOps engineer as well. ☺️
  
  I think this is a great idea as well. I don't have quite the experience set of @ziiki_transport2 (Primary PSE) but am sure I could pitch in, in some way. Would be a good venue for brainstorming ideas as well(not that you seem to need it ;))
  
  Feel free to ping me as well if something sets up. I currently don't have the time or personal grit to run a full instance on my own, but I know how to run linux, postgres, mysql, networks and other things. Ansible/Chef mostly as well, some puppet, some salt. Been doing this for 10 years or so on different stacks.
  I'd be happy to be part of some "Lemmy-OPs-Support" group, wherever it may be to chime in with experience.
- Wouldn't something like a Matrix server be more in line with the 'philosophy' of the fediverse?
- Reddit is for Lemmy as Discord is for Spacebar (works with Discord) https://github.com/spacebarchat/spacebarchat

All hail ruud ~~/u/ruud~~ (does that work?) Oh I have to make an actual link?
Oh and fuck spez.

@ruud@lemmy.world, I just want it to be known that you rock. Fucking thank you for all the hard work!

Just donated $10! Appreciate all the work you all are doing to keep up with the growth.

Just subbed to the Patreon!

Came here from Reddit and I already love it so much more! :)

sounds good. i mean it is only 10 to 30 minutes no login and lemmy.world content but because of the decentralization content from other servers should still be viewable. To the reader: it would be nice it you pay money IF you can. Server bandwidth is a problem that can mostly be solved by throwing money at it
- I threw a few bucks for gas in patreon. Keep truckin my friend.

The OpenCollective link seems to be reaching an error page a, FYI.
- It didn't work for me until I created an account. Once I confirmed my account via the email link, it took me to the page to donate to mastodon.world directly.
- For me too
  
  Yeah very strange. I copied the URL from the browser, where I see it working. Then when I click the link it doesn't work. Odd. https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld is the link

Thanks Ruud!

so cool getting to see this thing grow in real time

Thanks for everything so far. Will definitely be donating

Thank you very much. The welcome for all us reddit refugees has been really warm and it's deeply appreciated.

Thank you for making this happen! Just signed up for a regular donation to help with costs 👍

So my Patreon subscription has paid off already! 😁

I’m just another reddit refugee but I wanted to say thank you for your time, effort and money. As I slowly come to terms with federation I see why some are so passionate about it.

@ruud@lemmy.world DM me if you need help setting up monitoring/alerting on server health. IRL I'm on an SRE team, so happy to help where I can!
- Be interesting to see. I'd assume the db is the bottleneck, would be nice to get stats on that. Should point the way to scaling more economically, i.e. well spec'd DB server and cheaper app server(s).
  Could also use something like https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch to route read only queries to a replica without any application changes, although there's some nuances, e.g. it might need some finessing if the app writes and then reads in two sessions, expecting to see the results from the write in the read.

Thanks for accommodating us!

I would prefer if lemmy.world and mastodon.world donations were NOT comingled.
I want to donate to lemmy.world but already contribute to my mastodon instance (sfba.social) as well as the mastodon project.
- Buts the same guy hosting both lemmy.world and mastodon.world so the money is going to the same place regardless if they are comingled or not so why does it matter?
  
  Might be interesting for analytics

How to contribute? Do you have Patreon?

Cool, lemmy.world seems to be one of the busiest with lots of new users, we should be making it clear to new users that they can sign up with ANY lemmy instance and still access lemmy.world communities though. gotta keep the load spread out.
- Is there any way to migrate an account? I signed up to lemmy.ml since it was the first one in the list and I didn't really understand the model initially.
  
  I am using and typing on lemmy.ml right now. What I did to subscribe Lemmy.world is go to lemmy and use the search bar, copy and paste this !lemmyworld@lemmy.world
  
  No, or not yet. You don't lose that much by moving though
- Exactly like me I'm on a regional instance and still subscribed here remotely I see so many people on reddit obsessing over what server to join that they end up joing no server and getting hung up on things like trying to understand what the fediverse is an activitypub is or they get confused about mastodon vs kabin vs lemmy and so forth the fediverse in general needs to get better at explaining things in normal people language so people don't just end up not joing
  
  Yes that's true but it's also to be expected, as it's a different system and people take time to understand how things work. Go back 20 years ago and it was mostly youths on Facebook, the whole idea of it was just too complicated for most adults. Fast forward to the present day and...
  Same here, the new community will be comprised of tech savy and people who like to try new things for a while.

This is literally a Wikipedia moment for social media, thank you @Ruud

Thanks for all the work you put in @ruud@lemmy.world

When I saw you were an admin of a large mastodon server, I knew this Lemmy instance was in good hands. Well done!

Thanks for the awesome work!

as one of the new people here, awesome!

Thanks, Ruud, I've chipped in re costs :) Keep up the good work.
- Same thanks so much for doing this Ruud!

Sounds like Lemmy is quite power hungry. What are the specs of the new server? Can Lemmy be split into its services (e.g pictures on a different servers?)
- Pictures is already it's own service in the docker compose file. I don't know how easy it would be to move it to a different server though, but I suspect it can be done with a bit of fidling with the configuration.
  
  Also, it should be fairly easy to host the postgres on separate hardware.

I don't know what most of that means but you guys (and/or gals!) fuckin rule and I appreciate the absolute hell out of you.

New here as well. The patreon link is for mastodon.world. Donating here is helpful for mastodon and Lenny.world?
- Yes, but for mastodon there's currently enough. Now it's more for the added costs for Lemmy.

354 comments