It's a single server, Michael. What could it cost, $10?
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
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I'd donate 500$ for one month of high cores/RAM to brace the hug
Nice :) https://opencollective.com/lemmy
Already donated some, but admins said they're not gonna upgrade servers for it
The site currently runs on the biggest VPS which is available on OVH. Upgrading further would probably require migrating to a dedicated server, which would mean some downtime. Im not sure if its worth the trouble, anyway the site will go down sooner or later if millions of Reddit users try to join.
8 vCore
32 GB RAM
😬
2 follow-ups:
- Can we replace Lemmy.ml with Join-lemmy.org when Lemmy.ml is overloaded/down?
- Does LemmyNet have any plans on being Kubernetes (or similar horizontal scaling techniques) compatible?
Maybe some dns fail-over for lemmy.ml to point to join-lemmy.org might be cool indeed 🤔
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We need Self hosted team and team networking to represent. Would be amazing to see some community support in scaling Lemmy up.
Can we replace Lemmy.ml with Join-lemmy.org when Lemmy.ml is overloaded/down?
I dont think so, when the site is overloaded then clients cant reach it at all.
Does LemmyNet have any plans on being Kubernetes (or similar horizontal scaling techniques) compatible?
It should be compatible if someone sets it up.
You could configure something like a Cloudflare worker to throw up a page directing users elsewhere whenever healthchecks failed.
Then cloudflare would be able to spy on all the traffic so thats not an option.
spy on all the traffic
That's...not how things work. Everyone has their philosophical opinions so I won't attempt to argue the point, but if you want to handle scale and distribution, you're going to have to start thinking differently, otherwise you're going to fail when load starts to really increase.
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I'm sure you know this, but getting progressively larger servers is not the only way, why not scale horizontally?
I say this as someone with next to no idea how Lemmy works.
Its better to optimize the code so that all instances benefit.
Is it possible to make Lemmy (the system as a whole) able to be compatible with horizontally scaling instances? I don't see why an instance has to be confined to one server, and this would allow for very large instances that can scale to meet demand.
Edit: just seen your other comment https://lemmy.ml/comment/453391
It should be easy once websocket is removed. Sharded postgres and multiple instances of frontend/backend. Though I don't have any experience with this myself.
I think that is unavoidable, Look at the most popular subreddits , they can get something like 80 million upvotes and 66K comments per day, do you think a single server can handle that?
Splitting communities just so that it will be easier technically is not good UX.
@nutomic @Lobstronomosity In one of the comments I thought I saw that the biggest CPU load was due to image resizing.
I think it might be easier to split the image resizer off to its own worker that can run independently on one (or more) external instances. Example: client uses API to get a temporary access token for upload, client uploads to one of many image resizers instead of the main API, image resizer sends output back the main API.
Then your main instance never sees the original image
There is already a docker image so that should not be too hard. I'd be happy to set something up, but (as others have said) the DB will hit a bottleneck relatively quickly.
I like the idea of splitting off the image processing.
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There will either be an hour of downtime to migrate and grow or days of downtime to fizzle.
I love that there's an influx of volunteers, including SQL experts, to mitigate scaling issues for the entire fediverse but those improvements won't be ready in time. Things are overloading already and there's less than a week before things increase 1,000-fold, maybe more.
What's the current bottleneck?
SQL. We desperately need SQL experts. It's been just me for yeRs, and my SQL skills are pretty terrible.
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There are some SQL database optimisations being discussed right now and apparently the picture resizing on upload can be quite CPU heavy.
SQL dev here. Happy to help if you can point me in the direction of said conversation. My expertise is more in ETL processes for building DWs and migrating systems, but maybe I can help?
I've been helping on the SQL github issue. And I think the biggest performance boost would be to separate the application and postgresql onto different servers. Maybe even use a hosted postgresql temporarily, so you can scale the db at the press of a button. The app itself appears to be negligible in terms of requirements (except the picture resizing - which can also be offloaded).
But running a dedicated db on a dedicated server - as close to the bare metal as possible give by far the best performance. And increase it for more connections. Our production database at my data analytics startup runs a postgresql instance on an i9 server with 16 cores, 128GB RAM, and a fast SSD. We have 50 connections set up, and the run pgbouncer to allow up to 500 connections to share those 50. And it seamlessly runs heavy reporting and dashboards for more than 500 business customers with billions of rows of data. And costs us less than US$200pm at https://www.tailormadeservers.com/.
apparently the picture resizing on upload can be quite CPU heavy
This suggestion probably won't help with hosted VPS, but lib nvJPEG pushes crazy theoretical numbers for image resizing.
Probably not, but it does mention a more general CUDA based solution that might be interesting to add to Pictrs. I could for example move my Pictrs instance onto a server that does have an older Nvidia GPU to accelerate stuff (to use for Libretranslate and some other less demanding ML stuff).
Edit: Ok looks like the resizing is anyways only supported on Pictrs 0.4.x which most Lemmy instances are not using yet. However this seems to use regular ImageMagick in the background, so chances are quite high that it can be made to work with OpenCL: https://imagemagick.org/script/opencl.php
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Is it running in a single docker container or is it spread out across multiple containers? Maybe with docker-machine or kubernetes with horizontal scaling, it could absorb users without issue - well, except maybe cost. OVH has managed kubernetes.
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I'm a Reddit refugee (new number who dis?)
I'm in the processing of closing on a house/moving so i don't have a ton of extra money or time laying around, but I work in tech as a junior Linux admin with some experience with some big data tech (HDFS, some Spark, Python, etc).
How can I help?
Good question. Seeing as your set of skills don't quite align with Lemmy's core componentes (Rust backend and Inferno frontend), your best bet would probably be on helping new people settle in, improving documentation, translations, discussing new ideas (like for onboarding), etc.
Any form of help is highly appreciated!
I only know enough code to break things, but I wouldn't mind working on some documentation - I'll go read what Lemmy needs; thanks for reminding me that anyone can chip in.
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Based on looking at the code and the relatively small size of the data, I think there may be fundamental scaling issues with the site architecture. Software development may be far more critical than hardware at this point.
What are you seeing in the code that makes it hard do scale horizontally? I've never looked at Lemmy before, but I've done the steps of (monolithic app) -> docker -> make app stateless -> Kubernetes before and as a user, I don't necessarily see the complexity (not saying it's not there, but wondering what specifically in the site architecture prevents this transition)
Right now it looks to me like Lemmy is built all around live real-time data queries of the SQL database. This may work when there are 100 postings a day and an active posting gets 80 comments... but it likely doesn't scale very well. You tend to have to evolve to a queue system where things like comments and votes are merged into the main database in more of a batch process (Reddit does this, you will see on their status page that comments and votes have different uptime tracking than the main website).
On the output side, it seems ideal to have all data live and up to the very instant, but it can fall over under load surges (which may be a popular topic, not just an influx from the decline of Twitter or Reddit). To scale, you tend to have to make some compromises and reuse output. Some kind of intermediate layer such as every 10 seconds only regenerate the output page if there has been a new write (vote or comment change).
don’t necessarily see the complexity (not saying it’s not there
It's the lack of complexity that's kind of the problem. Doing direct SQL queries gets you the latest data, but it becomes a big bottleneck. Again, what might have seemed to work fine when there were only 5000 postings and 100,000 total comments in the database can start to seriously fall over when you have reached the point of accumulating 1000 times that.
Out of curiosity how would https://kbin.social/ source: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core stand up to this kind of analysis? Is it better placed to scale?
The advantage kbin has is that it is build on a pretty well known and tested php Symphony stack. In theory Lemmy is faster due to being built in Rust, but it is much more home-grown and not as optimized yet.
That said, kbin is also still a pretty new project that hasn't seen much actual load, so likely some dragons linger in its codebase as well.
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I don't have any experience with that specific app, so I don't currently know.
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I'm also willing to donate to other instances too - Beehaw, Sopuli, Lemmygrad, Lemmyone - Anything so we can have better shock absorption. If you run one of those instances, please reply and let us know how much you think you need
At the moment, I run lemmy.world using the funding of mastodon.world. If Lemmy.world might grow and need a dedicated server, I'll try to raise funds for it separately (or create a larger .world fundraiser as I have other instances as well)
What if a bunch of groups from the Fediverse hosted a huge fundraiser and distributed the funds to where they were needed? Maybe even kept a bank of funds for when large, temporary influxes of funding are needed.
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This is why I also subscribe to the communities on mastodon just in case
can you interact with mastodon on here? sorry if it's a stupid question, i am new to the whole fediverse thing.
Yes you can :) There are no stupid question, we're not accostumed to these kind of structures for social networks so it's very normal to have them. I can suggest some video like this to understand better how federation works
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Currently, I believe Mastodon/Misskey/Calckey/Akkoma/Friendica users can post and reply to Lemmy groups/communities. There doesn't seem to be a way to follow them from Lemmy, though.
I think you might be able to follow Friendica groups, though.
And kbin and Lemmy have a lot of interoperability.
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