I’m looking for input on how well Piefed responds to occasional downtime of up to a few days, specifically regarding how federation recovers after such an event.
Basically looking to know how amenable it is to selfhosting via reverse proxy from dodgy setups which are the best some of us proles can manage. I try to run some services where I can but my situation inevitably results in an event or three per year, on average, with some days down.
PieFed will retry the sending of every federation activity for 4 days before it starts dropping things. So if you’re offline for 3 days then it’ll be ok. But at the moment 95% of the federation traffic is sent by Lemmy servers so their retry window is the more relevant one. I don’t know what theirs is but I think it’s much longer than PieFed.
If you compare https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list with https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list and look at the uptime columns, you’ll see Lemmy and PieFed are roughly equal. PieFed has slightly better uptime on average but instances are younger and have much less users so… grain of salt. The point is they’re in the same ballpark. Hardware and network failures are going to be the thing that has the biggest influence.
This is very useful info, thanks. I am definitely interested in PieFed for other reasons too so I will be giving it a look :)
If I could make one suggestion, it would be to extend the retry time, perhaps with a backoff in time between retries. Just speaking as somebody whose main issue with occasional outages is having something break when I’m having a brain fog episode and literally cannot rally the mental resources to fix it right away.
Yes, it has a backoff. I agree 4 days is pretty short, when I was coding it I had no idea what impact it would have on performance so was pretty conservative but things have been going fine so I’ll extend it and see how things go.
Wow, this is super cool to hear, thank you!