This is the level of transparency that most companies should strive for. Ironic that in terms of fixing things, volunteer and passion projects seem to be more on top of issues compared to big companies with hundreds of employees.
You said it: passion projects. While being paid is surely a motivator, seeing your pet project take off the way Lemmy is can be so intoxicating and rewarding! I plan to donate as soon as I get paid on Friday! I want to see this succeed, even if it is just to spite Reddit, and I am willing to pay for the pleasure.
Thanks for all of your effort. Even though we are on different instances, it’s important for the Fediverse community that you succeed. You are doing valuable work, and I appreciate it.
i just wanted to thank you for doing your best to fix lemmy.world as soon as possible.
but please, don't feel forced to overwork yourselves. i understand you want to do it soon so more people can move from Reddit, but i wouldn't like that Lemmy software and community developers overwork and feel miserable, as those things are some of the very motives you escaped from Reddit in first place.
in my opinion, it would be nice that we users understand this situation and, if we want lemmy so bad, we actively help with it.
this applies to all lemmy instances and communities, ofc. have a nice day you all! ^^
Plus, slow steady growth means eventual success. Burnout is very real if you never take a break.
so true, pal! slowly, with patience, no rushing, putting love into it, organizing ourselves, working smart is better than working hard and fast.
because of the federated nature of fediverses like Lemmy, it is very possible that many people are doing the very same task without even knowing they are duping each other's efforts.
and that's sad because if they knew, they could be teaming up, or splitting the task in two, in order to avoid wasting different efforts into dupe results.
i have learnt a thing or two about burnout, it's better for me to make 40% planning, and 40 % self-care and so the 20 % of execution becomes piece of cake.
but this is just my opinion. anyway, please take care, pals <3
I'm just excited to be back in the Wild West again -- all of the big players had bumps, at least this one is working to fix them.
And giving updates!
I’d rather have to deal with hiccups and bumps along the way, because the community only grows more each time.
good news, a fix might be in the works: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3482
Yes phiresky is working with us improving performance, has helped a lot so far! (We're now running a custom build with some of his improvements)
Just tried upvoting most of the comments here, and this time all of the upvotes went through and were extremely fast! No more 502 errors!
I've noticed lemmy.world has been much more responsive today so something seems to be working!
Thanks for sharing. It was very interesting to see the graphs showing the before and after.
Thank you for your effort!
You're welcome! (testing comments now... )
It looks like it's working.
I am very forgiving of the bugs I encounter on Lemmy instances because Lemmy is still growing and it's essentially still in beta. I am totally unforgiving of Reddit crashing virtually every day after almost two decades.
The need to restart server every so often to avoid excessive ram usage bit is very interesting to me. This sounds like some issue with memory management. Not necessarily a leak, but maybe something like server keeping unnecessary references so the object cannot be dropped.
Anyway, from my experience Rust developers love debugging such kind of problems. Are Lemmy Devs aware of this issue? And do you publish server usage logs somewhere to look deeper into that?
server keeping unnecessary references so the object cannot be dropped
You indeed just described a memory leak :D
I want this to succeed so badly. I truly feel like it’s going to be sink or swim and will reflect how all enshitification efforts will play out.
Band together now and people see there’s a chance. Fail and we are doomed to corporate greed in every facet of our lives.
How can I donate to lemmy.world?
Just look at the sidebar:
Donations
If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the mastodon. world donation URLs:
https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
https://patreon.com/mastodonworld
Not an expert, but here is where I set up a recurring donation. Apparently Mastadon.world and Lemmy.world are run by the same admins. Took me a while to understand this, please correct me if I'm wrong.
That is, if we restart Lemmy every 30 minutes. Else memory will go to 100%
Lemmy has a memory leak? Or, should I say, a "lemmory leak"?
Cloud architect here— I’m sure someone’s probably already brought it up, but I’m curious if any cloud native services have been considered to take the place of what I’m sure are wildly expensive server machines. E.g. serve frontends from cloudfront, host the read-side API on Lambda@Edge so you can aggressively and regionally cache API responses, anything other than an SQL for the database — model it in DynamoDB for dirt cheap wicked speed, or Neptune for a graph database that’s more expensive but more featureful. Drop sync jobs for federated connections into SQS, have a lambda process that too, and it will scale as horizontally as you need to clear the queue in reasonable time.
It’s not quite as simple to develop and deploy as docker containers you can throw anywhere, but the massive scale you can achieve with that for fractions of the cost of servers or fargate with that much RAM is pretty great.
Or maybe you already tried/modeled this and discovered it’s terrible for you use case, in which case ignore me ;-)
You were so close until you mentioned trying to ditch SQL. Lemmy is 100% tied hard to it, and trying to replicate what it does without ACID and Joins is going to require a massive rewrite. More importantly - Lemmy's docs suggest a docker-compose stack, not even k8s for now, it's trying really hard not to tie into a single cloud provider and avoid having three cloud deployment scripts. Which means SQS, lambdas and cloudfront out in the short term. Quick question, are there any STOMP compliant vendors for SQS and lambda equivalent yet?
Also, the growth lemmy.world has seen has been far outside what any team could handle ime. Most products would have closed signups to handle current load and scale, well done to all involved!
cloudfront helps a lot with the client and is absolutely compatible with lemmy if you set it up correctly. possibly it could also help cache api responses, i haven't looked into that part yet.
the database, on the other hand, would need a nearly full rewrite. lemmy uses postgres and dumping it for something else would be a huge pain for the entire federated community. it could probably tear it in half.
there's also the issue of pictrs, which uses a stateful container and isn't yet able to use an external database which would allow you to scale it horizontally. resolving that one is on the roadmap though, and for the most part you can aggressively cache the pictrs get requests to alleviate the read-side load.
but whatever the solution is, it kinda needs to be as simple as developing and deploying docker containers you can throw anywhere. the vendor-agnostic setup is a very important part of the open-source setup of lemmy. it's fine to build on top of that, but currently anyone with docker-compose installed can run the service and that really should be retained.
Thank you for everything! Can we donate to cover the costs? If more people throw in $5, we all will benefit. Can Lemmy server scale up without needing RAM exponentially growing with the user number? I hope the system will get better optimized for bigger user base as the time goes on..
Thanks again for all the hard work on Lemmy World. It feels fast today
Thanks for giving us all these updates all the time!
I feel that lemmy runs smoothly the past few hours with very few hiccups and mostly on the upvoting and commenting side. I encountered no issues yet on the loading of the post.
Thank you so much for all your hard work.
.world is definitely running smoother than when I joined 3 days ago, back then it was impossible to comment and the lag was immense, right now I just have to occasionally reload the page, but that's nothing in comparison.
You guys are doing an amazing work! I'm broke, so here are some ~~coins 🪙🪙🪙🪙~~ beans 🫘🫘🫘🫘
I can't imagine how hard it is to rua server that has influx of large users. I Thank you for your hard work to run and maintain this instance. Hope it works out well and future will be a smooth sail.
Really appreciate all the time and effort you all put in especially while Lemmy is growing so fast. Couldn't happen without you!
Thank you so much for your hard work and for fixing everything tirelessly, so that we can waste some time with posting beans and stuff lol.
Seriously, you're doing a great job <3
To all the folks that are worried, don't be. Let me tell you, Mastodon was a wreck when Musk took over Twitter and that all got sorted out within a week or so. The mods and sysadmin are obviously working hard to get things up and running, but growing pains are growing pains. To paraphrase an old adage: "Facebook wasn't built in a day." In the beginning, Zuck and Co literally limited signups to only people with college email accounts and only added universities a few domains at a time... scaling is very difficult, but it's not impossible. The way things are going, Lemmy is going to thrive!
Thank you for the transparency @ruud@lemmy.world It is rare for platforms to scale this quickly so issues like this are inevitable. Good luck for the troubleshooting!
Y’all doing amazing things keeping us going 🔥
Thanks for the transparency, and communication. I think it's always better when the userbase is able to understand what is going on rather than being left in the dark wondering what is going wrong. Keep up the good work, but also be sure you guys get enough rest, and take care of yourselves too.
Thanks for keeping us apprised. Hopefully you will find the resource leak.
I totally appreciate all of your efforts! Thank you for being a pioneer.
Amazing work team. I am already seeing improvements. Hope you are not killing yourselves though, I'm sure everyone realises how difficult it is and that it will take time to fix. We're here for the long haul! Thanks again
Do you need any spare server hardware? @ruud@lemmy.world I would be happy to donate some!
No thanks, it's all at Hetzner, and thanks to all donations we can extend when needed!
Thank you for everything you do. With any luck, you'll get all the support you need, and have it running smooth as silk.
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