this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
22 points (89.3% liked)

Asklemmy

43329 readers
2631 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

feddit.de has been giving "Server error" for some time but I read that the server is still working when using a Lemmy app. Tried the Photon front-end today and choosing feddit.de as instance.

My question (I'm just curious, I have no account on feddit.de) is : Can an alternative front-end on their server co-exist with the other server software ? I guess it would be a matter of installing Photon and then point nginx configuration to that. Or am I missing something crucial ?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] victorz 0 points 3 months ago (10 children)

That's bad software then, right? The inability to write to disk shouldn't cause the software to lose all functionality. Unless that's its only function, or somehow depends on it for proper functioning. 🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (9 children)

No. Every good software program should write at least logs to disk. Every good database writes to disk. Add a new post, db will commit to the db and the db will grow in size.

Name any decent sized program where new content is added and I guarantee it writes to disk and will fail eventually if not maintained.

[–] victorz 2 points 3 months ago (8 children)

Nice down vote. Let's discuss instead.

I'm saying that the server shouldn't go down just because new content can't be added. You should get maybe a 500-series REST response or something. Not... nothing. Ideally it should write to disk. Ideally it should allow new content to be added. But uptime and content access is still more important than being able to write to disk. It should warn the admin of the serious errors, and explain to the user in some diplomatic/apologetic manner. But never go down completely. That's not resilient at all.

That's my opinion. 👍

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

For the record I did not downvote.

But I capitulate on your point. It would be great if every piece of software was written with resilience and uptime in mind.

As a former sysadmin that sounds like a dream. But I don’t think I have ever seen that with any mainstream program that I’ve had responsibility for. Does that mean all those programs were bad? I don’t think so. We wouldn’t need sysadmins if all programs were written the way you describe.

Programs can be written to auto rotate their logs, compact and reindex their db’s. Using browser updates as an example, they can even safely auto update and revert back on failure.

How many programs actually do these things? My experience is next to 0. But I wouldn’t call them all bad or poorly written programs.

[–] victorz 1 points 3 months ago

For the record I did not downvote.

Thank you. It's alright, just aimed at whoever did. Sorry if it came off salty!

How many programs actually do these things? My experience is next to 0. But I wouldn’t call them all bad or poorly written programs.

I meeeaaan... I hear what you're saying. I think your definition of "bad" is a bit stricter than what I was going for. So, you're right. They're not bad in some sense that they're useless or something along those lines. But if I were to write server software, my main goals I guess would be security, performance, and resiliency to failure. Stay alive at all costs (within reason).

But I think we're both on the same side there on all counts. 😁👍

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)