this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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This is unfortunate to hear. Have you considered creating a proof-of-concept fork with synthetic data that demonstrates how much more performant a cached, filtered approach would be? I think a magnitude or two improvement of some key metrics with heavy simulated load would be quite convincing.
Of course, that would be an insane amount of work, especially if it would get ignored, but something to consider!
I already did an insane amount of work to populate a Lemmy database with over 10 million posts. It is so incredibly slow out of the box that the normal API would take days to accomplish this. i had to rewrite the SQL TRIGGER logic to allow bulk inserts.
Here is my work on that:
With this in place, 300,000 posts a minute can be generated and reaching levels of 5 million or 10 million don't take too long.
That's really cool work! It's a bit beyond my pay grade, so I can't really comment too much about it.
I had a look at the PR you mentioned, and again, while I can't comment on the contents because I am a little out of my depth, may I voice my opinion on the exchange? This is coming from a place of trying to help, since I really do appreciate all the work you've put in and are putting in, and the fediverse can really use your talents, so I hope I don't offend you.
From my reading, it didn't appear that you were being ignored/hazed, and it seemed like the devs would have been open to your improvements. From working and leading big teams, I've noticed that communication and managing emotions is often much harder than writing code. In the thread, it appeared that communication had broken down on both sides (and seemed to have been the case in prior interactions too). Since you mentioned your struggles with autism in the thread, I wonder if that played a part in the tone of the devs perhaps being misinterpreted ? This is, of course only my interpretation, and I could be completely wrong.
Ultimately Lemmy itself is an example of trying to build a community and consensus amongst a broad and diverse group of people, who will often not see eye to eye.
In any case I would like to say I personally appreciate your hard work and really do hope you're able to help make Lemmy better. Thank you!
Ok, so let's look at recent changes that they have deployed.... https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3886
One of which makes entire tree of comments disappear. Do you see developers fretting over this and fixing it? Or do you see them ignoring the May 27 PostgreSQL JOIN problem.
How did such a bug go out? Do you see Lemmy developers actually using Lemmy to test things and notice these crashes and problems? Do you look at their posting and comment history? Do they actually go login over at Beehaw and Lemmy.world and see just how terrible the code performance is?
If it isn't hazing, what is it?
It's as if they build a product only for other people to use... and they don't notice any of the constant crashes, incredibly slow performance etc - and they act like nobody in the computer industry ever heard of Memcache or Redis to solve performance problems. If it isn't extreme hazing going on, then what is it?
I’ve been reading a lot of your exchanges on the Lemmy GitHub and I can tell you with a high degree of confidence that you are not the subject of a hazing ritual. What’s going on is a miscommunication issue; there’s no ill will directed towards you.
The Lemmy devs are under a great deal of stress these days due to the recent influx of activity, both on the big Lemmy instances as well as the Lemmy GitHub. You’ve clearly gone to great lengths to investigate various SQL bottlenecks in Lemmy, and this work does not go unnoticed or unappreciated.
The problem you’re likely running into is that the Lemmy devs are trying to address a wide array of issues, whereas you are zoomed in on some very specific performance problems. Whether or not the core devs are wrong when they say your findings are irrelevant is beside the point. What they are really saying is that they do not have the attention bandwidth to try to see what you are seeing right now.
If you find yourself unable to work with the Lemmy project, there are other fedi projects in Rust like Mitra or Kitsune which might be more receptive to your contributions. I’m personally very interested in seeing rudimentary Lemmy (Groups et.al.) compatibility in Kitsune.