In the past two weeks, the site has been very unstable, sometimes for one second a page would load and the next it wouldn’t load at all. The status of lemmy.world would fluctuate a lot on lemmy-status.org, and there have times where the site has been down for hours.
This is the same reason I had to turn off my search engines crawler.
There were changes made to the API to ignore any page > 99. So if you ask for page 100 or page 1_000_000_000 you get the first page again. This would cause my crawler to never end in fetching “new” posts.
lemm.ee on the other hand made a similar change but anything over 99 returns an empty response. lemm.ee also flat out ignores
sort=Old, always returning an empty array.Both of these servers did it for I assume the same reason. Using a high page number significantly increases the response time. It used to be (before they blocked pages over 99) that responses could take over 8-10 seconds! But asking for a low page number would return in 300ms or less. So because it’s a lot harder to optimize the existing queries, and maybe not possible, for now the problematic APIs were just disabled.