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

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ruud@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] Ataraxia@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Wow that was fast.

[-] rarkgrames@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

[-] Ataraxia@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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[-] SkidFace@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

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!

[-] BackOnMyBS@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

how nice people seem here

yes! I love the culture of this place so far

[-] impulse@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

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?

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[-] fudrummer@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

@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!

[-] parsifal@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Does it work on water now that it has MORE POWA?

[-] Refugee_Allstar@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

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

[-] delaghetto@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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?

[-] fubo@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

"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.

[-] Proko@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for all you do @ruud@lemmy.world. You’re doing great!

[-] hddsx@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

[-] figaro@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Nice!

[-] alizard@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Thankyou for everything!

[-] ClumsyAssassin@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Just joined. Thank you so much for your effort!

[-] FlaxPicker@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Itd be cool to get donation flare!

[-] mo_ztt@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You can! ☑️ or ✅. The Patreon page mentioned that you're officially allowed to edit your username to add flair when you donate. I upgraded to $8/month specifically so I could add the flair, but then got cold feet about the idea. 😀

[-] FlaxPicker@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

Nice! Why the cold feet? Just curious.

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[-] clutch@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Is one donation method preferred over another? That is to say, is one cheaper than the other?

[-] mango@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

I don't understand why a dedicated server is a good idea, when the only true way to scale is to use like Kubernetes or Docker and ECS Containers with scale?

Your just gonna run into more problems, you cannot vertically scale forever.

[-] ZeeKay@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] slashzero@hakbox.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] Raitontime@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

More power! More power is good.

[-] Someology@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for you work on this! What is the planned time for the outage?

[-] Zenryoku@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago

Thank you very much! 🥳

[-] ilikedatsyuk@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for everything you're doing. I signed up for Patreon to contribute!

[-] andobando@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

What kind of server configuration are you guys running? A single instance?

[-] CoolBeance@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

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[-] novettam@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

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!

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[-] lp0101@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

I'm not too familiar with Lemmy's codebase, but I am a devops engineer. Is the software written in any way to support horizontal scaling? If so, I'd be happy to consult/help to get the instance onto an autoscaling platform eventually.

[-] terebat@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago

Doesn’t support HA or horizontal scaling yet from what I read. Unsure if kbin does. Probably would have to add support for horizontal scaling to have that auto scaling do anything.

[-] lp0101@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. Understandable though, since horizontal scaling/HA usually isn't a priority when developing a new application.

[-] genfood@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

The code is open source on GitHub and the backend is written in Rust.

I have no idea how it goes in terms of scaling…

[-] pleasemakesense@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

Apparently it's not ideal at Horizontal scaling (that's what I've picked up from reading stuff here, could be wrong)

[-] nulldev@lemmy.vepta.org 0 points 1 year ago

I think they can horizontally scale the Postgres maybe? Postgres is probably the biggest performance bottleneck.

[-] pleasemakesense@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Have they implemented the postgres? Last I read they were still using websockets (I think I'm not a programmer and don't know what all that means lmfao)

[-] api@fedia.io 0 points 1 year ago

Anyone looking to host something big should check out bare metal hosting like Datapacket, Reliablesite, FDCServers, etc. Down side is total lack of handholding and other cloud features and the fact that you can't scale up without redeploying on a new box, but the upside is ridiculously cheap bandwidth. The bandwidth cost is by size of pipe, not gigabyte transferred, and pipes upwards of 10gbps are affordable.

OVH and Hetzner are also worth looking at but aren't quite as cheap bandwidth-wise.