Are there any Discord servers or somewhere in the Matrix to chat about hosting a Lemmy instance? I’ve got Lemmy running, but I think there are several of us in the same boat struggling with federation performance issues and it might be good to have some place to chat real time.

  • HTTP_404_NotFoundEnglish
    5•2 years ago

    Honestly- a lot of the performance issues aren’t due to OUR servers- but, the upstream servers.

    beehaw.org, lemmy.world, for example- I think their servers are completely overloaded, and are having issues keeping up.

    I don’t have sync issues for the smaller/other servers at all. Just the big ones.

    I have 128G of ram, 32 cores dedicated. I have the federation worker count set at 256. There is NO shortage of resources, and my server sits more or less, idle.

    Due to this only really impacting those larger instances- I believe the blame may lie there.

    • FreemanEnglish
      3•2 years ago

      Agree on this. When i run docker-compose up and dont detach it, my instance is just constantly asking for updates, and I only get warnings from the biguns.

      Honestly I am not sure how scalable this is. It would borderline make more sense to federate authentication and just dump you to the destination instance/community when you click a link and interact directly with it rather than relying on async at the server level.

    • chiisanaEnglish
      3•2 years ago

      I think it is less about pointing fingers as to who’s at blame, and trying to see if there are things we can do to resolve/alleviate that.

      I recall reading somewhere that @[email protected] mentioned before that the server is scaled all the way up to a fairly beefy dedicated server already, perhaps it is soon time to scale this service horizontally across multiple servers. If nothing else, I think a lot of value could be gained by moving the database to a separate server than the UI/backend server as a first step, which shouldn’t take too much effort (other than recurring $ and a bit of admin time) even with the current Lemmy code base/deployment workflow…

      • HTTP_404_NotFoundEnglish
        1•2 years ago

        Well- I do know- most of the components do scale.

        The UI/Frontend, for example, you can run multiple instances easily.

        The API/MiddleTier, I don’t know if it supports horizontal scaling though. But, a beefy server can push a TON of traffic.

        The database/backend, being postgres, does support some horizontal scaling.

        Regarding the app itself, it scales much better if EVERYONE didn’t just flock to lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, and beehaw.org. I think that is one of the huge issues… everyone wanted to join the “big” instance.

        • chiisanaEnglish
          5•2 years ago

          If you look here: https://lemmy.world/comment/65982

          At least specs and capacity wise, it doesn’t suggest it is hitting a wall.

          The more I dug into things, the more I think the limitation comes from an age old issue in that if your service is expected to connect to a lot of flakey destinations, you’re not going to be in for a good time. I think the big instance backend is trying to send federation event messages, and a bunch of smaller federated destinations have shuttered (because they’re not getting all the messages, so they just go and sign up on the big instances to see everything), which results in the big instances’ out going connection have to wait for timeout and/or discover the recipient is no longer available, which results in a backed up queue of messages to send out.

          When I posted a reply to myself on lemmy.world, it took 17 seconds to reach my instance (hosted in a data centre w/ sub 200ms ping to lemmy.world itself, so not a network latency issue here), which exceeds the 10 seconds limit per defined by Lemmy. Increasing it on the application protocol level won’t help, because as more small instances come up, they too would also like to subscribe to big hubs, which will just further exacerbate the lag.

          I think the current implementation is very naive and can scale a bit, but will likely be insufficient as the fediverse grows, not as the individual instance’s user grows. That is, the bottle neck will not so much be “this can support instance up to 100K users” but rather “now that there’s 100K users, we’d also have 50K servers trying to federate with us”. And to work around that, you’re going to need a lot more than Postgres horizontal scaling… you’d need message buses and workers that can ensure jobs (i.e.: outward federation) can be sent effectively.

          • KingEnglish
            1•2 years ago

            I agree here. I don’t see Federation scaling without major arch changes. I can’t see a server making 50k (subscribed servers) outbound connections for every upvote, comment, etc.

            Q: How many Federated actions, on average per user per community per day? Probably a low number, say 5. But 5 * Users * Servers is a huge number of connections once Users and Servers get moderately large. 500k users and 5k servers is 12.5 billion connections, just for one community.

            • chiisanaEnglish
              1•2 years ago

              They’ve bumped the server much more than the original posted VM. I was pointing to the zabbix charts and actual usage. Notice CPU is sub 20%, and the network usage being sub 200Mbits. There’s plenty of headroom.