Status update July 4th
Just wanted to let you know where we are with Lemmy.world.
Issues
As you might have noticed, things still won’t work as desired… we see several issues:
Performance
- Loading is mostly OK, but sometimes things take forever
- We (and you) see many 502 errors, resulting in empty pages etc.
- System load: The server is roughly at 60% cpu usage and around 25GB RAM usage. (That is, if we restart Lemmy every 30 minutes. Else memory will go to 100%)
Bugs
- Replying to a DM doesn’t seem to work. When hitting reply, you get a box with the original message which you can edit and save (which does nothing)
- 2FA seems to be a problem for many people. It doesn’t always work as expected.
Troubleshooting
We have many people helping us, with (site) moderation, sysadmin, troubleshooting, advise etc. There currently are 25 people in our Discord, including admins of other servers. In the Sysadmin channel we are with 8 people. We do troubleshooting sessions with these, and sometimes others. One of the Lemmy devs, @[email protected] is also helping with current issues.
So, all is not yet running smoothly as we hoped, but with all this help we’ll surely get there! Also thank you all for the donations, this helps giving the possibility to use the hardware and tools needed to keep Lemmy.world running!
This is what I was originally picturing. So that logged in users would be browsing on pretty much entirely separate instances (avoiding them having to reuse as much).
I hadn’t really decided on how I best liked the idea of handling logins, since there’s so many possible options. It could be that users would just have to either know their server (so you’d have to sign in as [email protected]). Or the load balancer could maintain a simple store of users/emails to instances to avoid that. Or at the cost of extra complexity (yay), you could replicate the user across all the instances but only make a single instance active for that user at a time (that’s a pretty common technique with systems I work with, with servers being strongly coupled to some range of resources to maximize efficiency).
I noticed you talked about the load balancer being a person. Sounds like it’d be better if it was a bot. They just see which pool is currently the emptiest and put them there, right?
Although you seem to be suggesting live instance swapping. Which might be possible in the future. Right now appears to be tied to registration.