Lemmy Project Priorities Observations

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I've raised my voice loudly on meta communities, github, and created new [email protected] and [email protected] communities.

I feel like the performance problems are being ignored for over 30 days when there are a half-dozen solutions that could be coded in 5 to 10 hours of labor by one person.

I've been developing client/server messaging apps professionally since 1984, and I firmly believe that Lemmy is currently suffering from a lack of testing by the developers and lack of concern for data loss. A basic e-mail MTA in 1993 would send a "did not deliver" message back to message sender, but Lemmy just drops delivery and there is no mention of this in the release notes//introduction on GitHub. I also find that the Lemmy developers do not like to "eat their own dog food" and actually use Lemmy's communities to discuss the ongoing development and priorities of Lemmy coding. They are not testing the code and sampling the data very much, and I am posting here, using Lemmy code, as part of my personal testing! I spent over 100 hours in June 2023 testing Lemmy technical problems, especially with performance and lost data delivery.

I'll toss it into this echo chamber.

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[email protected]

2023-08-19 (bulletintree.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Weeks ago I had my moment of facing the attitude of keeping all this secret.

Just casually mention join_collapse_limit was tried behind-the scenes a month ago, then why are there zero post or comments in the entire Lemmy search for join_collapse_limit? I searched the entire GitHub project - no mention of join_collapse_limit. But Ready on the Spot to reveal the secret private communications tried join_collapse_limit log ago.

You know what join_collapse_limit is telling yo8u? Too many JOIN is a performance problem! The entire ORM Rust code and reliance on new JOIN is going to lead to other unpredictable performance problems that varies when there are 10,000 posts vs 2 million posts! And that's exactly the history of 2023... watching the code performance wildly swing based on the size of communities being queried, etc.

What I see is that pull request for ideas get created only after noise is made on a subject. There is a lack of openness to make mistakes in public.

For me,** the server crashes are what annoys me**, not human beings working on solutions. But for most of the people on the project, what seems to anthem is needing to have proper tabs vs. spaces on source code and even adding layers of SQL formatting tools in the middle of what clearly can be described as an SQL performance crisis.

Things keep getting broken: the HTML sanitation took a few hours to add to the project but now weeks of broken titles, HTML code blocks, even URL parameters are now broken on everyday links. The changes to delete behavior have orphaned comments and that has gone on for weeks now.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

PostgreSQL keeps failing

And I feel like the project keep ignoring that basic fact. The servers crashing aren't a feature, they are a bug! Yes, now there are 1500 instances to brag about, but they are all pulling data from lemmy.world and all the broken things in federation are smoldering issues.

join_collapse_limit is the PostgreSQL design team telling you don't build apps with 15 JOIN on real-time no-caching queries. And look what happens, it goes off into wild behaviors depending on the amount of data that has built up on a given server. And new instances starting with zero data gives the illusion that the problem is solved... but once data starts getting into that database, the overhead of all that JOIN logic and counting grows and grows.