At the time of writing, Lemmyworld has the second highest number of active users (compared to all lemmy instances)

Also at the time of writing, Lemmyworld has >99% uptime.

By comparison, other lemmy instances with as many users as Lemmyworld keep going down.

What optimizations has Lemmyworld made to their hosting configuration that has made it more resilient than other instances’ hosting configurations?

See also Does Lemmy cache the frontpage by default (read-only)? on [email protected]

  • Ruud@lemmy.worldM
    17·
    1 year ago

    Thank you for all the compliments.

    This ride reminds me of Mastodon.world in November. Details on that are here: https://blog.mastodon.world/and-then-november-happened

    So I started lemmy.world on a 2CPU/4GB VPS. Keeping an eye on the performance. Soon I decided to double that. And after the first few thousand of users joined, doubled it again to 8CPU/16GB. That also was the max I could for that VPS type.

    But, already I saw some donations come in, without really asking. That reminded me of the willingness to donate on Mastodon, which allowed me to easily pay for a very powerful server for mastodon.world, one of the reasons it grew so fast. Other (large) servers crashed and closed registrations, I (mainly) didn’t.

    So, I decided to buy the same large server (32cpu/64threads with 128GB RAM) as for masto (but that masto one has double the RAM). With the post announcing that, I also mentioned the donation possibilities. That brought a lot of donations immediately, already funding this server for at least 2 months. (To the anonymous person donating $100 : wow!).

    Now next: to solve the issue with post slowness. That’s probably a database issue.

    And again: migration took 4 minutes downtime, and that could have been less if I wasn’t eating pizza at the same time. So if any server wants to migrate: please do! If you have the userbase, you’ll get the donations for it. Contact me if you have questions.

    • Balthazar@sopuli.xyz
      2·
      1 year ago

      And this kindness and willingness to help is why I’ve already fallen in love with Lemmy. Thank you good sir, thank you dearly for helping the next generation of internet denisens :D

      • mjgood91@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        I bet you could do it if your instance didn’t pull in a lot of traffic.

        If it did… I reckon that you might be able to pull it off to a certain extent so long as your internet package was good enough, but if you got hit with a Reddit-level flood of incoming users, your network almost certainly wouldn’t be able to keep up.

        Even if it could, if you were consistently eating through all the upload bandwidth, I reckon you’d draw the eyes of your ISP and they might send you a letter kindly and respectfully telling you that if you don’t upgrade to a commercial line they’re not renewing your contract.

    • million@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      Nice job, thanks very much for the write up.

      Out of curiosity are you cloud hosting or do you own a server on a rack somewhere? Scaling with Kubernetes or VMs or just running bare-metal?

    • Xanvial@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      Interesting, I’m new on Lemmy (and fediverse itself), but when you said server does it means the backend that handles frontend traffic or database that stores all the data? Seems the next optimization step is distributing the traffic to multiple servers.

      Also (again I don’t know about the lemmy system itself), maybe you can get away with just upgrading CPU cores only or RAM only (depends on what bottlenecking the system). From my experience, the RAM requirement is scaling slower compared to CPU

    • Xaphanos@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      As someone “in the business”, but not nearly as technical as you… How far can a single instance scale? Can a load balancer spread it over mulitple front-ends to handle user load? Can the back-end be re-worked to handle hundreds of millions of user operations per second? Can it work with a CDN? Can a single “Lemmy.World” site exist as a distributed site - with hundreds of servers spread across dozens of sites across the globe?

      I expect this entire line of thought is antithetical to the entire Lemmy philosophy of distributed operation. I expect that the “correct” way is to spin off “NA.Lemmy.World”, EMEA. Lemmy.World", APAC.Lemmy.World", etc. as separate servers. Is that correct?

      Thanks.

    • Dream_state@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      Am I able to use the same account to login to mastodon.world? Or do I need to make an account there too? Never used mastodon but vining the fediverse stuff

        • Balthazar@sopuli.xyz
          1·
          1 year ago

          You can, you just must log in to the server/website in which you made the account, then browse over to the server you wish to contribute to or use.

          It’s a bit weird, I know. If you’ve got any questions I’ll try my best to answer them :D