At the time of writing, Lemmyworld has the second highest number of active users (compared to all lemmy instances)
Also at the time of writing, Lemmyworld has >99% uptime.
By comparison, other lemmy instances with as many users as Lemmyworld keep going down.
What optimizations has Lemmyworld made to their hosting configuration that has made it more resilient than other instances' hosting configurations?
See also Does Lemmy cache the frontpage by default (read-only)? on !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml
Based
Hey, you rock. This place is pretty cool.
Amazing stuff!
I hope others will follow suit, it's the biggest hurdle right now for serious adoption in my opinion and you crushed it!
What does it cost per month to operate your servers, namely this one?
Wow. That's so much more than I expected!
really, more?. We're taking a dedicated server hosting thousands of users posting content
Am I able to use the same account to login to mastodon.world? Or do I need to make an account there too? Never used mastodon but vining the fediverse stuff
You can, you just must log in to the server/website in which you made the account, then browse over to the server you wish to contribute to or use.
It's a bit weird, I know. If you've got any questions I'll try my best to answer them :D
I bet you could do it if your instance didn't pull in a lot of traffic.
If it did..... I reckon that you might be able to pull it off to a certain extent so long as your internet package was good enough, but if you got hit with a Reddit-level flood of incoming users, your network almost certainly wouldn't be able to keep up.
Even if it could, if you were consistently eating through all the upload bandwidth, I reckon you'd draw the eyes of your ISP and they might send you a letter kindly and respectfully telling you that if you don't upgrade to a commercial line they're not renewing your contract.
Interesting, I'm new on Lemmy (and fediverse itself), but when you said server does it means the backend that handles frontend traffic or database that stores all the data? Seems the next optimization step is distributing the traffic to multiple servers.
Also (again I don't know about the lemmy system itself), maybe you can get away with just upgrading CPU cores only or RAM only (depends on what bottlenecking the system). From my experience, the RAM requirement is scaling slower compared to CPU
As someone "in the business", but not nearly as technical as you... How far can a single instance scale? Can a load balancer spread it over mulitple front-ends to handle user load? Can the back-end be re-worked to handle hundreds of millions of user operations per second? Can it work with a CDN? Can a single "Lemmy.World" site exist as a distributed site - with hundreds of servers spread across dozens of sites across the globe?
I expect this entire line of thought is antithetical to the entire Lemmy philosophy of distributed operation. I expect that the "correct" way is to spin off "NA.Lemmy.World", EMEA. Lemmy.World", APAC.Lemmy.World", etc. as separate servers. Is that correct?
Thanks.
Best would be to have thousands of servers. I wouldn't make them subdomains of lemmy.world, but people could create separate instances for large communities, for example. https://lemmy-selfhosted.com Scaling: if the Lemmy software gets tuned a bit better, I think the current server could host at least a million users. But let's hope for more servers first...
Looks like the guy who runs it runs a lot of fediverse servers, I guess he knows what he's doing: https://lemmy.world/u/ruud
@ruud runs a top 10 mastodon server.
Fwiw, he has been providing quite a lot of transparency in his posts to this community. He's shared his hardware config in detail, posted maintenance posts with brief descriptions of what he's doing, and replied to comments around specific config tweaks. I haven't catalogued a list of links, but I've seen him do all of these things in the last 48h. It's easy to imagine that all these things could be compiled in real time into a how-to, but it's a pretty big deal just to keep the lights on right now, and pretty difficult to understand whether tweaks that helped your setup are generally applicable or only situationally useful and happen to perform well for your specific setup.
I'm sure we will see more high-performance Lemmy guides in the future, but at this point no one has more than 36h of experience with high-performance Lemmy. Give them a minute to catch up.
Saying this without any knowledge of lemmy's backend... Large, high user count databases with (very quickly) growing demand take more power than generally expected. At a certain point, throwing money at the problem is the solution.
I'm not an admin, but have followed the sizing discussions around the lemmyverse as closely as I can from my position of lacking first-hand knowledge:
lemmy.ml is the biggest instance by user count, but runs on incredibly modest 8-cpu hardware. Their cloud provider doesn't provide any easy scale up options for them, so they can't trivially restart on a bigger VM with their db and disk in place. I suspect this means that instance is going to suffer for a bit as they figure out what to do next.lemmy.world on the other hand was running on a box at least twice as big as lemmy.ml at last count, and I believe they can go quite a bit bigger if they need to.lemmy.world admins also run mastodon.world and lived through the twitterpocalypse, seeing peak user registrations rates of 4k per hour. So this is not their first rodeo in terms of explosive growth, I'm sure that experience gives them some tricks up their sleeve.I'm surprised that sh.itjust.works isn't growing faster. They also have a hefty hardware setup and seemingly the technical admins to handle big user counts. I wonder if it's a branding problem, where lemmy.world sounds inviting and plausibly serious where sh.itjust.works sounds like clowntown even though it's run by a capable and serious team.
I wonder if it's a branding problem, where
lemmy.worldsounds inviting and plausibly serious wheresh.itjust.workssounds like clowntown
That was my thought process when choosing an instance tbh. I'm not a tech person, I looked at the list and lemmy.world was the first 'safest feeling' instance that had open sign up. I saw sh.itjust.works and didn't even check their sign up process, there was too many periods in the strange name and it just looks weird to me as someone not used to these things. Edit: spelling
I definitely second the motion on it being a branding problem. Stuff like sh.itjust.works seem to me like something that dark basement tech nerds would come up with that is "edgy" and really only used by them and other people like them.
I'm not really into the ironic "edgy" aesthetic and part of the struggle with this transition for me has been orienting myself in the space because I don't want to commit to some "sketchy" edgelord URL
something that dark basement tech nerds would come up with that is βedgyβ and really only used by them and other people like them.
That's exactly what it is and why I love it. The whole thing about this federated networking is that it doesn't matter where you signed up.
Where you sign up entirely determines your local feed.
Where you sign up greatly effects moderation and administration issues like updating the software the instance runs on to benefit from security fixes, optimizations, and enhancements.
I do think join-lemmy.org could possibly be changed to show server usage/capacity and uptime. When I initially signed up I went for lemmy.ml because what the heck is the difference? Honestly I was having all kinds of timeouts and thought the entire lemmy-verse was probably struggling. I was concerned that was the experience everyone was getting that they were going to leave because it is unsustainable.
But I ended up seeing a page showing the uptime of serversnand lemmy.world was 100% (at that point). So I figured I'd start an account here. HOLLY CRAP IT IS SO MUCH FASTER. I would have had a hard time sticking around if it all worked like lemmy.ml.
I started a community on lemmy.ml. Wish I would have done it here.
nah, I'm bit regretting not signing up on their instance. sh.itjust.works is a cool name and can be a brag point. lol. lemmy world is a bit too generalist, but I won't migrate there as ruud (the admin of lemmyworld) is doing a good job managing the instance. I appreciate that. :)
I joined sh.itjust.works because of the name, but it seems to run pretty well.
For what it is worth, I looked at sh.itjust.works . Reason I choose beehaw.org was they were more local, and had more local content and users. Plus the server focus and values seemed to fit me better. Yes their domain is a bit odd but that was not a factor for me.
I originally signed up with sh.itjust.works, but I wanted to be on the instance with the majority of migrants.
Also, it sounds dumb, but I think the sh.itjust.works domain is just kinda weird, technically has a "curse word" in it (not that I personally care), and they don't support NSFW content (which isn't just used for porn). So, it didn't make sense to have that as my home instance. π€·ββοΈ
Edit: Also, this is my first comment on here! Hello world! π
Yeah, I get it. Naming optics aside, it seems an instance with a lot of headroom relative to others, with a capable team. Would be near the top of my word-of-mouth options in spite of the idiosyncratic name.
It's been running a little slow today though so maybe not as much headroom as you think
Lemmy.world was just migrated to a dedicated server: https://lemmy.world/post/75556
Guess we're just different kinds of people...
Can none of this scale horizontally? Every mention of scaling has been just "throw a bigger computer at it".
We're already running into issues with the bigger servers being unable to handle the load. Spinning up entirely new instances technically works, but is an awful user experience and seems like it could be exploited.
It's important to recall that last week the biggest lemmy server in the world ran on a 4-core VM. Anybody that says you can scale from this to reddit overnight with "horizontal scaling" is selling some snake oil. Scaling is hard work and there aren't really any shortcuts. Lemmy is doing pretty well on the curve of how systems tend to handle major waves of adoption.
But that's not your question, you asked if Lemmy can horizontally scale. The answer is yes, but in a limited/finite way. The production docker-compose file that many lemmy installs are based on has 5 components. From the inside out, they are:
So... first off... there's 5 layers there that talk to each other over the docker network. So you can definitely use 5 computers to run a lemmy instance. That's a non-zero amount of horizontal scaling. Of those layers, I'm told that lemmy and lemmy-ui are stateles and you can run an arbitrary number of them today. There are ways of scaling nginx using round-robin DNS and other load-balancing mechanisms. So 3 out of the 5 layers scale horizontally.
Pict-rs does not. It can be backed by object storage like S3, and there are lots of object storage systems that scale horizontally. But pict-rs itself seems to still need to be a single instance. But still, that's just one part of lemmy and you can throw it on a giant multicore box backed by scalable object storage. Should take you pretty far.
Which leaves postgres. Right now I believe everyone is running a single postgres instance and scaling it bigger, which is common. But postgres has ways to scale across boxes as well. It supports "read-replicas", where the "main" postgres copies data to the replicas and they serve reads so the leader can focus on handling just the writes. Lemmy doesn't support this kind of advanced request routing today, but Postgres is ready when it can. In the far future, there's also sharding writes across multiple leaders, which is complex and has its downsides but can scale writes quite a lot.
All of which is to say... lemmy isn't built on purely distributed primitives that can each scale horizontally to arbitrary numbers of machines. But there is quite a lot of opportunity to scale out in the current architecture. Why don't people do it more? Because buying a bigger box is 10x-100x easier until it stops being possible, and we haven't hit that point yet.
I'm now going to start incorporating "Sounds like clowntown" into my everyday conversations - that's funny!
"clown world" was at least initially a reference to how the CIA meddles in the affairs of the world (Clowns In America).
Quit clowning around.
That's actually awesome for users of sh.itjust.works. Like myself.
Iβve been having issues registering for lemmy.world so I went with sh.itjust.works and itβs been great so far
I had issues trying for lemmy.world yesterday, but it worked fine today. I just waited a day because I figured between upgrades and a massive influx of new users it was probably gonna be a bit unstable sometimes.
Yeah Iβm being patient, I canβt imagine the stress the hardware and humans behind all this are under. I did get my lemmy.world account registered eventually. Not sure what server to call home yet!
I had a very similar thought process when choosing my instance. lemmy.world seemed like it would be more open to new users than an instance named sh.itjust.works. Idk why that was my thought process but Iβm here now
I hope lemmy.ml can upgrade at some point. A lot of the slowness I'm running into is trying to browse/discovery communities that happen to live on that instance.
Right, but if you don't have a cache setup, then the DB gets taxed. At a certain point a cache looses its benefit, but an enormous amount of savings can be made (to backend DB calls, for example) by just caching all API reads for ~60 seconds.
Ensuring there's no data leakage in those cached calls can be tricky, especially if any api calls return anything sensitive (login tokens, authentication information, etc) but I can see caching all read-only endpoints that return the same data regardless of permissions for a second or two being helpful for the larger servers.
It's also worth noting that postgres does its own query-level caching, quite aggressively too. I've worked in some places where we had to add a SELECT RANDOM() to a query to ensure it was pulling the latest data.
In my experience, the best benefits gained from caching are done before the backend and are stored in RAM, so the query never even reaches those services at all. I've used varnish for this (which is also what the big CDN providers use). In Lemmy, I imagine that would be the ngnix proxy that sits in-front of the backend.
I haven't heard admins discussing web-proxy caching, which may have something to do with the fact that the Lemmy API is currently pretty much entirely over websockets. I'm not an expert in web-sockets, and I don't want to say that websockets API responses absolutely can't be cached... but it's not like caching a restful API. They are working on moving away from websockets, btw... but it's not there yet.
The comments from Lemmy devs in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2877 make me think that there's a lot of database query optimization low-hanging fruit to be had, and that admins are frequently focusing on app configs like worker counts and db configs to maximize the effectiveness of db-level caches, indexes, and other optimizations.
Which isn't to say there aren't gains in the direction your suggesting, but I haven't seen evidence that anyone's secret sauce is in effective web-proxy caches.
lemmy.ml just migrated to bare metal https://lemmy.ml/post/1234235
Having to seperate kbin from the rest of the fediverse is really limiting, and makes the experience more fractured.
I played around with the Stylus browser extension and made a custom script with adjustments to widths, padding, font sizes, line heights, etc and Lemmy started to feel a lot better and more familiar. I'm sure there are really talented people working on ideas to make it better.
π€ Can't wait to see how things develop!
Does anyone have any recommendations for where you could host a cheap instance? Under 100 users?
Friggen excellent reply! Thank you! Saving this!
It's known in the industry as the throw-hardware-at-it optimization. It's often effective and what's needed to buy time for software optimization to come in.
As someone who got burnt out on one of their last businesses due to optimizing too early - Yes!!!
Doing it "properly" with "stateless servers" and "autoscaling" with "Kubernetes" costs a hell of a lot more money than a 64 Core server with 256 GB of RAM
Talk about dumb luck! I chose this server (apparently 2 days after launch) because docmentation suggested choosing a less populated server to spread the load. Now I'm on one of the biggest and most stable. Me so happy!
I didn't choose this server but I can still join and post. Greetings from Lemm.ee!
He has been posting updates along the way. It's a combo of upgrading the server as it hits its limits and tuning of his web proxy and docker container to handle the increased load and federation requirements.
Been doing an amazing job of it too. I just randomly chose this instance and I'm glad.
Edit. Here is his last post https://lemmy.world/post/75556
Likely experience and knowledge improving the quality of deployment. Most instances are likely underspecced, are on hosts that aren't easy to scale up with, or are maxed out in their current offering tier (lemmy.ml comes to mind there)
@lemmy.world
This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.
For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.
Any support requests are best sent to info@lemmy.world e-mail.
If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.
If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us
go to feed...
@lemmy.world
This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.
For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.
Any support requests are best sent to info@lemmy.world e-mail.
If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.
If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us
go to feed...
Thank you for all the compliments.
This ride reminds me of Mastodon.world in November. Details on that are here: https://blog.mastodon.world/...
So I started lemmy.world on a 2CPU/4GB VPS. Keeping an eye on the performance. Soon I decided to double that. And after the first few thousand of users joined, doubled it again to 8CPU/16GB. That also was the max I could for that VPS type.
But, already I saw some donations come in, without really asking. That reminded me of the willingness to donate on Mastodon, which allowed me to easily pay for a very powerful server for mastodon.world, one of the reasons it grew so fast. Other (large) servers crashed and closed registrations, I (mainly) didn't.
So, I decided to buy the same large server (32cpu/64threads with 128GB RAM) as for masto (but that masto one has double the RAM). With the post announcing that, I also mentioned the donation possibilities. That brought a lot of donations immediately, already funding this server for at least 2 months. (To the anonymous person donating $100 : wow!).
Now next: to solve the issue with post slowness. That's probably a database issue.
And again: migration took 4 minutes downtime, and that could have been less if I wasn't eating pizza at the same time. So if any server wants to migrate: please do! If you have the userbase, you'll get the donations for it. Contact me if you have questions.
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