this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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So after we've extended the virtual cloud server twice, we're at the max for the current configuration. And with this crazy growth (almost 12k users!!) even now the server is more and more reaching capacity.

Therefore I decided to order a dedicated server. Same one as used for mastodon.world.

So the bad news... we will need some downtime. Hopefully, not too much. I will prepare the new server, copy (rsync) stuff over, stop Lemmy, do last rsync and change the DNS. If all goes well it would take maybe 10 minutes downtime, 30 at most. (With mastodon.world it took 20 minutes, mainly because of a typo :-) )

For those who would like to donate, to cover server costs, you can do so at our OpenCollective or Patreon

Thanks!

Update The server was migrated. It took around 4 minutes downtime. For those who asked, it now uses a dedicated server with a AMD EPYC 7502P 32 Cores "Rome" CPU and 128GB RAM. Should be enough for now.

I will be tuning the database a bit, so that should give some extra seconds of downtime, but just refresh and it's back. After that I'll investigate further to the cause of the slow posting. Thanks @[email protected] for assisting with that.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm not an engineer or a dev - but requiring a 32-core, $2000+ CPU to support 12k users doesn't seem like it would scale well. Is this normal, or does the fediverse require more computational resources than a simpler setup like reddit? How would a fediverse instance with 100k users be maintained?

[โ€“] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Look at the pricing!

Hetzner wants 150โ‚ฌ for this server. 3TB disk is 50โ‚ฌ extra. So 200โ‚ฌ for the server per month. This is also about 200$ so 1.6ยข per user and month. This should be very manageable.

Also it doesn't mean the server only holds 12k users. If the server holds 20k users or more you Look at less than a Cent cost per user and month.

They are already raising 600โ‚ฌ per month via Patron only so 3 months worth per month. If the server gets bigger, more people will probably give money and while it stays a kinda hobby project it should work out fine.

But you are right with something else:
Lemmy currently has no ability to loadbalance over multiple servers for one instance. This will become a Problem in the future, but it is being worked at.

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Reddit is not a "simpler setup". Reddit has gigantic amounts of computational resources to throw at things. Resources that make servers like this look like a Raspberry Pi. They're just much less transparent about how the backend works and what they have.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Was thinking the same thing, is a lemmy instance supposed to be literally a single server instance?

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I'm also interested in the answer to this question.