Hey lemmings!
I wanted to share a quick update about our recent performance issues and how I have addressed them.
The last 24h have been a bit rough for lemm.ee.
Last night, I spent some time debugging federation issues with lemmy.world. We managed to significantly improve the situation - lemmy.world content is now reaching lemm.ee with a very high success rate - but this has had the effect of increasing incoming federation traffic on our servers significantly.
Additionally, we have been seeing steadily increasing normal user traffic over the past week, which is awesome from a community standpoint, but of course means that our servers have to do more work to keep up with all the new people.
To top things off, today there appeared a badly configured instance in the network, which was effectively launching a DoS attack against lemm.ee for several hours. Most likely it was unintentional, but unfortunately the end result was a sudden increase in our server load.
All these factors combined resulted in a really bad experience for most lemm.ee users today. Page load times have consistently been spiking into as much as 10 seconds or more for the whole day:
In fact, a lot of page loads just timed out with errors.
Fortunately, it seems I have managed to clear up the problems!
I have put a bunch of mitigations in place, and after monitoring the situation for the past hour, it seems that our performance issues have been resolved for now. So hopefully, you can enjoy browsing lemm.ee again without it feeling like torture!
Here are specific steps I took:
- I have doubled the hardware resources for our backend servers and database.
- I purchased a Cloudflare pro subscription for lemm.ee for 1 year. This took out a considerable chunk of my budget for lemm.ee, but in return it will allow me to analyze and optimize our cache usage to a far greater extent. I am already seeing vastly reduced load times for cacheable content (try opening https://lemm.ee a few times in a row as a logged out user - it should be blazing fast now!)
- I have configured a rate limiter which will prevent future DoS from the specific method that was used against us today.
Of course, all of the above is costly. Luckily, lemm.ee users have been very generous with donations in the month of June, and in fact a significant amount of donors have opted for monthly recurring contributions. This all gives me the confidence to increase our spending for now, and I am currently expecting to NOT increase my personal planned contribution of 150€/month, as the increased costs so far are entirely being covered by donations!
Let me take this opportunity to thank the sponsors who made the upgrades possible! All lemm.ee users are now enjoying better performance thanks to you, I could not have done it without you awesome people.
On a final note, I just want to say that I hope a lot of these issues can be solved by optimizations in Lemmy software itself in the future. I have been personally contributing several optimizations to the Lemmy codebase, and I know many others are focused on optimizations as well. Just throwing extra resources at the problem will probably not be a sustainable solution for very long 😅. But I am optimistic that we are moving in the right direction with the software changes, and we’ll be enjoying reduced resource needs before long.
That’s all I wanted to share today, I wish you all a great weekend!
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What a phenomenal response. Every single day makes me happy that I chose lemme.ee as my home instance. Truly appreciate all of the hard work you are pouring into this. And we can see how difficult it is based off of your total transparency. Thank you!
Yo, I’m a simple Reddit refugee, just trying to figure out how to make my way in the fediverse, and I signed up to lemm.ee not long after this post went up. I honestly chose this instance on a whim, and after a bit of exploring and learning about how Lemmy works, boy does this post make me glad I landed here!
Thanks for running this instance, and for housing us reddit noobs :)
I’m brand new, this is my first comment. Thanks for your work! Where can we donate to this instance?
I just signed up for a monthly donation to keep things running using their GitHub sponsorship page: http://github.com/sponsors/sunaurus
Love this community!
Thank you, signed up too!
What was the actual issue with lemmy.world? And how was that particular item solved?
Hey, you can check this post for more context: https://lemm.ee/post/493966
FYI: I’ve been unable to reply to direct messages
“Save” just spins forever, doesn’t show in sent messages.
I’ve just joined up to lemme.ee and subscribed to a community on another instance. I can see the posts in that community, but they all show up with zero comments. If I view the community on the web, there are several comments there. Is this a bug?
The community is [email protected]
It is a federation thing. Newly federated communities don’t load comments with their initial import. You’ll start to see comments as you go.
Just to add to the other reply, if there’s an old comment chain you really want to reply to you can grab the URL of the last comment, search for it through your home instance and that’ll force an index of the comment you searched for plus any parents.
Not sure if this is related to the infra upgrade, but my earlier issue with not seeing all the posts in the meta community is now fixed.
Awesome news! I did make a small fix to a localization bug in Lemmy-ui, which was causing some people to not see posts, so it could have been that. But in any case, I’m glad it’s sorted for you!
You are awesome man. I wanted to wait until the instance matured before committing to a monthly donation but I am signing up now. You’re the best instance admin anyone can hope for. Glad to see your patch make it to 0.18
I would like to see a create a sub for dummies video or post. I followed the link to create a sub, and I’m a dummy. I don’t get it. Once subs can be created easily, this community will grow much faster now that Apollo is gone. RIP
EAT my chode spez
I’ve not created any communities myself, but looking at the form it seems pretty straightforward. Is there a particular field that could be better explained, or are you getting some sort of error?
Beehaw upgraded too. Lemmy.ml seems to be delivering none of the messages for past few hours, it is erroring constantly for a local user.
Been browsing for a few days, decided to set up shop here, so to speak, upon seeing this.
Great work with this.
Agreed! I was hopping around trying to figure out how to choose an instance (and only somewhat understanding how the site works so far lol), but these super transparent posts and the effort clearly being put in to keep things running smoothly + be welcoming to reddit “refugees” is what made it easy to pick this instance to sign up on first! Thank you for all the hard work!! :)
I hope years from now you get to look back on these times as the beginning of something great not only for you, but also for the future of social media on the internet. Your dedication to this project has been admirable, and you are absolutely crushing it.
Thank you @[email protected] for all of your work. I am continually realizing that I chose the right instance with how transparent and responsive you have been.
This is so awesome! Thank you for everything you’ve done. You continue to prove my belief that this is the best instance to be on.
Yeah the slowdown was a bit rough, been browsing off and on all day today. Thanks for fixing that. Seems to be working a lot better now. That’s a bummer you had to increase expenses though.
