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Does Lemmy really benefit from Rust? Is code execution speed the bottleneck? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Buttons@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

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My first experience with Lemmy was thinking that the UI was beautiful, and lemmy.ml (the first instance I looked at) was asking people not to join because they already had 1500 users and were struggling to scale.

1500 users just doesn't seem like much, it seems like the type of load you could handle with a Raspberry Pi in a dusty corner.

Are the Lemmy servers struggling to scale because of the federation process / protocols?

Maybe I underestimate how much compute goes into hosting user generated content? Users generate very little text, but uploading pictures takes more space. Users are generating millions of bytes of content and it's overloading computers that can handle billions of bytes with ease, what happened? Am I missing something here?

Or maybe the code is just inefficient?

Which brings me to the title's question: Does Lemmy benefit from using Rust? None of the problems I can imagine are related to code execution speed.

If the federation process and protocols are inefficient, then everything is being built on sand. Popular protocols are hard to change. How often does the HTTP protocol change? Never. The language used for the code doesn't matter in this case.

If the code is just inefficient, well, inefficient Rust is probably slower than efficient Python or JavaScript. Could the complexity of Rust have pushed the devs towards a simpler but less efficient solution that ends up being slower than garbage collected languages? I'm sure this has happened before, but I don't know anything about the Lemmy code.

Or, again, maybe I'm just underestimating the amount of compute required to support 1500 users sharing a little bit of text and a few images?

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[–] Badabinski@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Any reason to use nginx versus something like Envoy? Like, I really like nginx, but Envoy's xDS API is really great for on-the-fly changes. I also think it might scale better and have more relevant default values. I'm just not sure if Lemmy ties into nginx in some way, or if you're purely using it as a reverse proxy.

I'll note that most of my Envoy experience is from using it with k8s and a custom ingress controller, where my org handles millions of requests per second (across many Envoy pods). Deploying it standalone might make it less fun.

[–] snowe@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Nginx is part of the lemmy-ansible install. I've never heard of Envoy though. if you're interested in helping out you can always join the discord. We also set up a matrix room, but it doesn't have as much discussion in it yet. https://app.element.io/#/room/!hmRRJzTsXkNAGIDXNu:matrix.org