this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
1867 points (99.4% liked)

Lemmy.World Announcements

29157 readers
421 users here now

This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.

Follow us for server news 🐘

Outages 🔥

https://status.lemmy.world

For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.

Support e-mail

Any support requests are best sent to [email protected] e-mail.

Report contact

Donations 💗

If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.

If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us

Ko-Fi (Donate)

Bunq (Donate)

Open Collective backers and sponsors

Patreon

Join the team

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
1867
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by ruud to c/lemmyworld
 

So after we've extended the virtual cloud server twice, we're at the max for the current configuration. And with this crazy growth (almost 12k users!!) even now the server is more and more reaching capacity.

Therefore I decided to order a dedicated server. Same one as used for mastodon.world.

So the bad news... we will need some downtime. Hopefully, not too much. I will prepare the new server, copy (rsync) stuff over, stop Lemmy, do last rsync and change the DNS. If all goes well it would take maybe 10 minutes downtime, 30 at most. (With mastodon.world it took 20 minutes, mainly because of a typo :-) )

For those who would like to donate, to cover server costs, you can do so at our OpenCollective or Patreon

Thanks!

Update The server was migrated. It took around 4 minutes downtime. For those who asked, it now uses a dedicated server with a AMD EPYC 7502P 32 Cores "Rome" CPU and 128GB RAM. Should be enough for now.

I will be tuning the database a bit, so that should give some extra seconds of downtime, but just refresh and it's back. After that I'll investigate further to the cause of the slow posting. Thanks @[email protected] for assisting with that.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Yes. It’s called performance testing. Basically an engineer would need to setup test user transactions to simulate live traffic and load test the system to see how everything scales, where it breaks, etc. Then you can use the results of the tests to figure out how big of an instance you should use for your projected number of users.

Jmeter, and locust.io are the two biggest open source performance test tools.

The alternative is take a wild guess. See how the system behaves, and make adjustments in real time… like what @[email protected] is currently doing.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Worth noting that typical app scaling does not scale linearly, and hardware caps out at some point (with diminishing returns up to that point) - federation will help with that much cheaper where normally a company would just have to throw more money at more servers themselves :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Yup. You don’t have to explain that to me. It’s funny when folks assume:

if I double the servers, I’ll get twice the throughput!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Just throw servers at it! It'll magically sort itself out!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Yeah, I meant specific data using lemmy.world as a datum, not the theoretical "check and see if you guessed right" method.