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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I migrated a few hours ago when Apollo went down and have had a great experience so far! Nice work.
Thank you. I did notice when it got significantly faster.
I joined this instance after reading this post. My inclination is to operate my own instance; but it seems best to wait until some of the dust settles and some of the bugs get discovered and fixed, first. The admins here seem capable of doing just that, while providing a stable platform.
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!
I jumped from another instance, this one loads so much faster and has more accurate numbers on communities from other instances. Really cool stuff.
Same here! So far this instance has ran really smooth for me.
Yeah @sunaurus@lemm.ee is really optimizing the hell out of this instance. A driver for me right now is he’s running the release candidate for 0.18.1 and it’s a huge improvement for me over 0.18.0. He’s also a dev on the project so he’s getting fixes in as well.
I just joined up too after having lots of issues on lemmy.world, which is not surprising with how many people are flooding over. Someone commented about lemm.ee and I’m also really liking it. The performance difference is huge! I also love how the owner/dev talks about the instance. Seems like this will be a good one to stick with and use as primary.
I am curious about membership counts on communities though. On other instances I’ll see a community member count of around 1000 and on here, it shows the (same community) is nowhere near that high. Are you saying that the lower number is more accurate? Or maybe it’s a syncing issue and with all the signups happening the numbers just haven’t had a chance to get caught up?
If you’re viewing a community through an instance that isn’t the one it’s actually hosted on, you’ll see a lower subscriber count because as far as I’m aware it’s showing the number of subscribers from the instance you’re viewing it on rather than the total.
The instance its hosted on is probably the most accurate. The reason I said this one was more accurate is because the old one I used had many posts without any comments and some posts were missing completely while this was showing most if not all of them. It will probably never be 100% synced due how lemmy works I guess.
I’m so grateful for your knowledge and persistence. My donation finally went through after fighting with my bank. Maybe I don’t have to give up my Gen X card afterall.
How much of the slowdown was caused by the bad instance VS the limitations of the previous hardware?
The DoS was responsible for about 10-20% increased load on our system - it wasn’t the root cause of the slowdowns, it was more like a nice cherry on top of the cake 😅 The bigger issue is the constantly increasing federation load.
Yay lemm.ee is back <3
I really appreciate how communicative you are about all the instance information. It’s what made me sign up just now!
You broke the https://lemm.ee homepage, it returns a json.
It should be fixed now!
It is, only that I had to clear the cache :)
It does load that JSON very quickly!
And really, who doesn’t love json?
I mean protocol buffers might be more efficient, but json is nice and readable. Much nicer than XML for an example. And significantly more readable than protobuf!
Ah, yes, the optimist
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
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
I have to admit I don’t really understand what you do, but I see some of your activities and I’m left feeling very impressed.
I’m not sure exactly what’s necessary to make this site and these federations actually turn into a fully fledged alternative and perhaps even a successor to “the old country”, and what mistakes to avoid becoming what made it turn worse. (I probably shouldn’t even involve myself in figuring that out.)
I am however sure that I am seeing you do a lot to make sure lemm.ee even has a chance. There is a lot of stuff blooming on here.
As a software engineer, this post convinced me to sign up for lemm.ee. So far it’s the most stable instance I’ve tried. I’ve seen a lot of questionable technical choices and messaging from other larger instances, but it seems like we’re in good hands here
FYI: I’ve been unable to reply to direct messages
“Save” just spins forever, doesn’t show in sent messages.
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?
