supakaity

Hey all!

Our lemmy.blahaj.zone has been updated to v0.19.5.

Let us know if you notice any issues with the upgrade!

Just testing image upload.

Hi all our lovely users,

Just a quick post to let you all know that along-side the upgrade to 0.19.3, we've also added a couple of alternate UIs to the Blåhaj lemmy for you.

Obviously the default lemmy-UI at https://lemmy.blahaj.zone still exists and has been updated to 0.19.3 alongside the lemmy server update.

There's also now an Alexandrite UI at https://alx.lemmy.blahaj.zone which is a more modern, smoother UI, written in svelte, by sheodox.

And then for those who are nostalgic for reddit days of yore, and memories of when PHP websites last ruled the earth, there's MLMYM (courtesy of rystaf) at https://mlmym.lemmy.blahaj.zone.

Please enjoy, and I hope the upgrades work well for you.

Esto es una prueba

Test

We're currently in the process of migrating our pict-rs service (the thing responsible for storing media/images/uploads etc) to the new infrastructure.

This involves an additional step of moving our existing file-based storage to object storage, so this process will take a little time.

New images/uploads may not work properly during this migration, however existing images should continue to load. We expect this migration to take about an hour.

[EDIT]

Migration has completed.

685,271 files / 153.38 GB were migrated. Copying to object storage took about 1.5 hours. Starting service back up on new server and debugging took another 30 minutes.

Timeline:

• Migration started at 2023-10-01 22:43 UTC.
• [+1h32m] Objects finished uploading to object storage at 2023-10-02T00:15 UTC.
• [+2h06m] Migration was completed at 2023-10-02 00:46 UTC.

Blåhaj Lemmy will be down for database migration to the new servers in approximately 1.5 hours from now (06:00 UTC).

Downtime is estimated at under an hour.

I will have more details on the maintenance page during the migration and update the status as the migration progresses.

The server will be briefly down while we install a new updated version of lemmy and restart it.

The maintenance window is 15 minutes, but should be much shorter.

So it's been a few days, where are we now?

I also thought given the technical inclination of a lot of our users that you all might be somewhat interested in the what, how and why of our decisions here, so I've included a bit of the more techy side of things in my update.

Bandwidth

So one of the big issues we had was the heavy bandwidth caused by a massive amount of downloaded content (not in terms of storage space, but multiple people downloading the same content).

In terms of bandwidth, we were seeing the top 10 single images resulting in around 600GB+ of downloads in a 24 hour period.

This has been resolved by setting up a frontline caching server at pictrs.blahaj.zone, which is sitting on a small, unlimited 400Mbps connection, running a tiny Caddy cache that is reverse proxying to the actual lemmy server and locally caching the images in a file store on its 10TB drive. The nginx in front of lemmy is 301 redirecting internet facing static image requests to the new caching server.

This one step alone is saving over $1,500/month.

Alternate hosting

The second step is to get away from RDS and our current fixed instance hosting to a stand-alone and self-healing infrastructure. This has been what I've been doing over the last few days, setting up the new servers and configuring the new cluster.

We could be doing this cheaper with a lower cost hosting provider and a less resiliant configuration, but I'm pretty risk averse and I'm comfortable that this will be a safe configuration.

I woudn't normally recommend this setup to anyone hosting a small or single user instance, as it's a bit overkill for us at this stage, but in this case, I have decided to spin up a full production grade kubernetes cluster with a stacked etcd inside a dedicated HA control plane.

We have rented two bigger dedicated servers (64GB, 8 CPU, 2TB RAID 1, 1 GBPS bandwidth) to run our 2 databases (main/standby), redis, etc on. Then a the control plane is running on 3 smaller instances (2GB, 2 CPU each).

All up this new infrastructure will cost around $9.20/day ($275/m).

Current infrastructure

The current AWS infrastructure is still running at full spec and (minus the excess bandwidth charges) is still costing around $50/day ($1500/m).

Migration

Apart from setting up kubernetes, nothing has been migrated yet. This will be next.

The first step will be to get the databases off the AWS infrastucture first, which will be the biggest bang for buck as the RDS is costing around $34/day ($1,000/m)

The second step will be the next biggest machine which is our Hajkey instance at Blåhaj zone, currently costing around $8/day ($240/m).

Then the pictrs installation, and lemmy itself.

And finally everything else will come off and we'll shut the AWS account down.

Our lemmy is now running the 0.18.2 release version, which should fix some lingering issues we've been having.

Let @ada or myself know if there's any issues!

Hi everyone, I'll begin migrating the lemmy blåhaj database to the new server this morning in about 20 minutes.

Expected duration is about 1 hour for this migration.

There will be a maintenance page up during the migration and I will be updating the status as we go to keep you updated on the process.

Later today I'll also be upgrading the software to the latest release as well.