As the reddit mods gets ready for the June 12-14 black-out, there some anticipation that an influx in user base will shift over to many of the lemmy instances as user seek out a home to post their internet memes and discuss their interests.
In anticipation of this increased volume I will be growing our current instance from
- 16 CPU
- 8 GB ram
to
- 24 CPU
- 64 GB ram
This server is currently equipped with SSDs that are configured in a raid 10 array (NVMEs will come in the next gen that get deployed)
Earlier today I also configured some monitoring that I’ll be watching closely in order to have a better understanding on how the lemmy platform does under stress (for science!)
I’ll be sharing graphs and some other insights in this thread for everyone that is interested. Feel free to ask anything you might be interested in knowing more of!
EDIT: I’ll be posting and updating the graphs in this main post periodically! Last updated: 6:21AM ET June 12th
CPU - 48 hours
Memory - 48 hours
Network - 48 hours
Load Average - 48 hours
System Disk I/O - 48 hours
For the icon: How about a Satisfied Seal? Because when sh.itjust.works, you know that feel!
I love this!
Here’s a link to the SVG of the Satisfied Seal so you can tweak as needed. I’ll also post the link in the comment thread. Glad people seem to like it!
Let me know if you want me to tweak the design any and I can send an SVG as well. No copyright/usage restrictions - free to use or modify as you wish.
Impressive setup! Would you be interested to have your instance recommended on the Lemmy project website?
That would be great! I checked your link and will work on completing the steps shortly :)
let’s goo! Great instance that deserves some growth! 🚀
Just joined you from that featured site, it just works. People are complaining about how hard it is to switch, I genuinely don’t know what the difficulty is
Tbf this is the sh.it just.works instance - some of the others a more hit and miss
This is one of the easier instances to join; most of even the big ones have a manual approval step/application process that slows things down.
@[email protected] that might be a good thing to note about the different instances? Or would that just tell the spammers where to spam?
Saw some dude who had spent a week on and off trying every couple of days to join and all the servers rejected him and he had given up lol. Most users are lazy fucks. If you want quality users, it’s okay to hide the goods and let the best people find them. If you want mass adoption you need to adapt to the lowest common demoninator.
Well that and you can’t even tell if you are rejected, and why. I waited over 24hours for one, and I still can’t tell if I was rejected or what. It is a nice feeling to just be able to use this without jumping through hoops
In the end I was accepted. I noticed because I tried to log in and succeeded. Now I have two accounts I guess.
Joined from recommended a bit less than an hour ago. Tried lemmy.ml, got rejected, went for this one cuz it was top recommended and I figured with the name and the user count the likelihood of rejection was smaller.
Thanks for the transparency
shit just works
oooh pretty colors!
Just discovered this place. Nice to see you guys are getting ready for the influx of users.
A little update for all of you interested. I allocated the additional resources to the VM and will post some updated graphs once they update with the new configurations.
For those who are like me and like looking at graphs here are some prior to the upgrade.
CPU - 48 hours
Memory - 48 hours
Network - 48 hours
Hello Lemmy! I’ve just made an account to get my foot in the door incase the Reddit execs don’t roll back after the blackout, let’s sit back and watch the fireworks.
so if I’m reading this right, less than 10% CPU capacity and about 1/8th ram at peak times, before upgrades? gotta give you credit where it’s due, that thing looks ready to take some abuse.
The only part I don’t have graphed yet is the disk IOs. I’m going to need to invest a little more time to get that metric going captured.
Say you through 1000s of active users to this instance… what would cause the bottle neck first? CPU, memory, network, disk? I’m thinking probably disk due to database optimization that need to be reworked on lemmy afterwards CPU and then memory.
Yeah disk iops is probably is gonna be the biggest hurdle, but so far so good…
I am from reddit migration. it’s 100000000000 times better, e.g. more accessible with my screenreader, on reddit, I needed to use special app, called dystopia which handled voiceover more gracefully.
damn that’s good to hear
I’d love to see a few additional charts with the next update:
- Disk space consumed
- Subscribers
- Communities federated
My guess is that’s not available vie SNMP for Librenms. :)
I’m being a little private about the total amount of disk assigned to this instance for now. I do plan on sharing these details when I have implemented a viable solution. That being said I can tell you that with the amount of current users and activities this instance is growing by about 20GB per day in disk size.
Holy shit… You tell us when you’ll accept donations, right? This doesn’t have to be your financial responsibility.
Or do you and I just haven’t found it yet?
Not taking donations at the moment. Still need to figure out the best way to collect donations and haven’t had the chance to think about it! I will eventually
No pressure :-)
And thank you for this <3
Is this an actual bare metal machine?
No its on a vm.
Which cloud?
It’s on colocated hardware that I have in a local datacenter.
Colo - very nice.
Thanks @TheDude. I work in enterprise network/systems/cloud operations as a network/security engineer. Would love to contribute monetarily or with time.
Any recommendations on VPS hosts. Thinking about creating my own.
There are many to choose from. Where are you located?
USA, IN
Check out Vultr. Super customizable. Have not gone down since I got mine (currently has 900 days uptime).
I’ve recently migrated a forum community (vbulletin -> discourse) using a vpn by Contabo (germany hosting). Their price are incredible and while you don’t get an official SLA, it’s around 99.5%.
I’ve never hosted anything big but cloud fanatic is cheaper than digital ocean. I migrated from the latter to the former earlier this year to save. And then someone told me AWS is basically free up to a certain usage point. $200 free credits/mo? I can’t remember what the “free” part implied. As always, do your own research, but you could join one and switch servers later on I guess.
+1 Cloud Fanatic. They were Server Cheap until a few months ago, but I guess that name turned people off. I don’t have any heavy usage so I cant really speak to that aspect, but I’ve never been over billed or unable to connect in 3 years.
I’m starting to get random 500’s, I guess that’s a sign I need to go to bed and let the server breathe lol. Can’t wait for the updated graphs!
Looks like it was related to a setting that needed to be tuned. I just updated the graphs. Server is not on fire yet!
Awesome, great to hear it!
The monitoring is with Prometheus / Grafana? Can you share your setup?
Prometheus /grafana would be great but I’m using an existing librenms setup via snmp probing
Can this thing run on a Pi clone with 4GB RAM and 4 cores?
It can definitely run on a Pi instance. The storage medium is going to be important as it will need to house a PostgreSQL database. Would be fine for a few users but not sure how many it would be able to handle concurrently.
It’s got 4 cores at 2.16GHz (I think 🤔), 4GB of RAM. Regarding the storage, that can be arranged. Currently there’s a 32GB SD card in it, it can be swapped for a 512GB one, no prolem.
So, how many users can an instance on a Pi like that serve?
My biggest concern with your setup is the SD card. SD cards aren’t typically known for their write durability. There is a way to use a SSD drive instead however its been a while since I checked the pi stats and might limited at speeds of usb 2. You’ll be fine for a small amount of users but you’re going to hit a bottleneck pretty quickly if you make your instance open to all.
This is actually a Pi clone, BannanaPi, it has more I/Os than a Pi, but it doesn’t have SATA… so, I can’t plug in an SSD, the best I can do is plug in a USB and save and load from that, but, as you said, it’s limited to USB 2.0 transfer speed.
Sorry, I just don’t have the funds to run a full blown server at home. A Pi is the best I can do 🤷.
Maybe ask someone from r/homelab to run an instance or two, those people have like a lot of extra hardware, not to mention they don’t mind spending a lot of money on electricity bills.
I was looking at that earlier too. I found LemmyNet on GitHub but haven’t had a chance to test it. But “can it run” is also a fundamentally different question than “can it run smoothly for end users as it gets hit with a huge influx of users,” and given the larger context of a potential Reddit exodus, that scalability concern is probably not negligible.
My point was, those that can, make one, fill it till it can serve users, then just disable registrations, so it doesn’t overload.
