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!
I just fucking love the transparency of the admins of lemmy.world and lemm.ee. Cheers guys!
You’re welcome!
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!
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!! :)
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 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.
On a side note, really liking this 0.18.1 release candidate version, the 0.18.1 official release is going to be brilliant. The new compact view is beautiful and it scales with window width nicely. They just need to drop the post header size a bit and the compact view will be perfect. This release candidate seems to be pretty solid, only seeing fixes, no new bugs.
I have configured a rate limiter which will prevent future DoS from the specific method that was used against us today.
For those of us running other Lemmy instances, what should we be looking for?
While a generally a good idea, this information is better shared privately
Cool! This is my first comment on Lemmy, and I’m excited to see what’s in store for the future here!
I jumped from another instance, this one loads so much faster and has more accurate numbers on communities from other instances. Really cool stuff.
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.
showing the number of subscribers from the instance you’re viewing it on rather than the total
I know this is not priority now, but it would be cool if it showed both.
Yeah it’s not the most useful stat as-is.
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
That explains all the weird numbers
Yeah it’s…an odd choice.
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.
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.
Same here! So far this instance has ran really smooth for me.
Thanks for taking care, making upgrades, monitoring, fixing, contributing, and informing us so thoroughly.
Also thanks to all the donors! This is all great to hear 😊
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
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’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.
Nice work!
