this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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chapotraphouse

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submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Edit: Update 2024-10-30

Let it be known that Mr. Alexandru was very patient with me and resolved everything for me by upgrading his infrastructure a few days later. I really appreciate it!


blob-on-fire

TankieTube is suffering from success.

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[–] [email protected] 98 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Tankietube must now do degrowth, confirmed thirdworldist site red-sun

[–] [email protected] 92 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Did you buy hosting from some person trying to do a startup in their college dorm?

[–] [email protected] 54 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Practically anyone can be a hosting provider because the software to do it is free, like phpBB.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Just reselling hosting services from a reseller from a reseller. Infinite layers of k8s pods.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 weeks ago

Your software will run in the pod. Your software will eat the bugs.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 3 weeks ago

its kubernetes all the way down

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

So if I get a good WiFi connection and unlimited data, could I then just leech of my ISP?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

Not for long

[–] [email protected] 83 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Ngl, I read the header "Dear Tankie" and it got my hackles up having read his email as passive aggressive, thought he clocked you're politics and was being a shitty mod about it, but then reading further it turns out it's your username and he seems chill lmao

Hope y'all can sort this out

[–] [email protected] 31 points 3 weeks ago

Dear Tankie, can you stop uploading that 4k video of 911 with the text "JDPON unlimited genocide on the United SSnake$ of AmeriKKKa" over and over again on my server?

[–] [email protected] 69 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
  • While we offer unlimited bandwidth and space to our customers we reserve the right to request that you delete excessive file such as large logs or anything else we deem excessive. Any uploaded files that cause the server to lag or make the server unplayable are not the responsibility of FREAKHOSTING.

Things like this scream red flags in my eyes, they'd rather use a more preferable term for marketing and hide arbitrary limitations in their acceptable use policy that most people aren't going to read rather than just sell you a product with limitations upfront (something like a 30TB/month bandwidth cap with no restrictions which is pretty standard for dedicated hardware of this price)

[–] [email protected] 32 points 3 weeks ago

Unlimited bandwidth^1^.

^1^ Limits apply. No, we will not tell you what they are.

[–] [email protected] 68 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Ya this is kinda why youtube is the only game in town for video hosting on that scale. There is a huge entry cost to start a service like that. The amount of traffic video streaming generates is just crazy. Not really comparable to something like lemmy which is mostly text. and even the pictures here load kinda slow lol. Not that im complaining just pointing out that video hosting is a whole other beast.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah it's why Vid.Me died. (Remember Vid.Me?)

And people have a lot of issues trying to use Vimeo and Dailymotion.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Deeply unserious hosting company, "we're poor uwu beans"

[–] [email protected] 86 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

The company seems to be a one man operation and I'd feel bad if I bankrupted him tbh.

I know it's all just business, but it hits me at an interpersonal level.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

If that company’s DDoS provider is Cloudflare, the bit about them wanting him to upgrade the contract is concerning. They will be bully the fuck out of this man into getting an enterprise account.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Death to Cloudflare, worlds greatest honeypot that everyone willingly hands their infrastructure over to.

hamas-red-triangle

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Can you share more about this? Sounds crazy

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

Using their proxy service (which is free for some reason) means all data between users and your site goes through cloudflare, meaning they can sniff them packets

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

Sorry for the late reply, kind of forgot to type this all out and it's kind of ended up being word soup and really simplified to make my point more accessible, but a lot of this can easily be researched in depth by just reading Cloudflare's own site/documentation if you're interested.

Firstly, as @[email protected] mentioned, a big problem is the ability for them to intercept all of your website's traffic if you're using their proxy service, which most people using Cloudflare are because it serves as a layer of protection from DDoS attacks since Cloudflare is able to filter/bear the weight of most attacks and only forward the "clean/legit" traffic to your website. In a world where passwords and other confidential information is sent over the wire in plain text because we're relying on HTTPS traffic being encrypted, this is a huge problem because Cloudflare ends up decrypting this traffic to provide their services which means they can see all this traffic in plain text as if it was never encrypted in the first place.

Secondly, they have the ability to just serve arbitrary JavaScript to your browser if they feel the need to. Just like they did a few months ago during the whole polyfill.io situation where they redirected all requests to polyfill.io to their mirror which could in theory host any JavaScript they'd like.

Thirdly, they offer a free service called WARP which promises you a faster internet browsing experience and was quite heavily marketed with lots of advertisements on YouTube some years back, it became quite big with all the tech channels showing it off, not sure how large it is now, but it's essentially a VPN, and as with all VPNs, they can see all incoming/outgoing traffic and do whatever they please with it, but don't worry, they pinky promise not to log or do anything with it!

That's just a few examples but if you look at the Cloudflare website they offer quite a lot of other services (a lot of which are free which makes them very appealing) which basically boil down to "let us control your infrastructure and all your traffic and in return we promise to make everything more secure and make your life so much easier".

All in all, it's just a bit unsettling that we're letting a private company that's based in the world's biggest surveillance state control over ~20% of the world's internet traffic. Especially when that traffic is unencrypted. I'm sure you've been around the internet long enough to know when Cloudflare goes down or has troubles, a large portion of the internet goes down and everyone starts panicking, lol.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago

yeah cloudflare is gonna shit all over him even if the bandwidth goes down. Not OPs fault tho, CF tightens the noose on everyone eventually.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks ago

Poor guy tbh.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

How much of this is between TankieTube and end users / peer instances vs. back and forth between TankieTube and the object storage provider? I don't know how they're measuring this, but if they are combining upload and download together as "traffic," then you are getting dinged twice for every video TT proxies (download from object storage, upload to end user - and traffic between data centers can rack up FAST). If a lot of round trips are being made between TT and the object storage provider, you might be able to alleviate this somewhat with caching (requiring more local disks) on the instance. Ideally, you should cache as much video as possible on the main server granting whatever headroom is needed for postgres etc. and fetch from object storage only on a cache miss.

Alternately, depending on the object storage provider, it might be possible for end users to download the media directly from them (using HTTP redirects or a CNAME record), but object storage usually meters bandwidth and charges for it (may be preferable to getting shut down, but also may be EXPENSIVE depending on the host).

If none of this is sufficient, you might need to look into load balancing / CDN. I know jack shit about this though, I just run a Mastodon instance and keep any media requested from object storage cached on the VPS for 7 days. It does not make optimal use of the disk, but it is sufficient for the use case (MUCH smaller media files, and heavily biased by the user interface towards recent posts).

[–] [email protected] 33 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

The server has a 2 TB SSD and I devote exactly half of it to a nginx cache for the object storage. It caches for up to a year.

PeerTube doesn't support horizontal scaling so I don't think I can use a load balancer. I don't know much about using CDNs.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Going by the server stats, that's 10% of the uploaded media, which should be pretty good I imagine (assuming a fraction of videos are popular and get a lot of requests while most videos don't get many views at all).

I guess another potential thing to look for is if people are deliberately trying to DOS the site. Not quite bringing it down, but draining resources. I could imagine some radlibs or NAFO dorks trying something like this if they caught wind of the place. Could also be caused by scrapers (a growing problem on the Fediverse and the Internet generally, driven by legions of tech bros trying to feed data to their bespoke AI models so they can be bought out by Andreesen-Horowitz).

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

I don't know where to begin for traffic monitoring like that. HetrixTools?

Do scrapers have a reason to download whole videos? Or are they just interested in the comments?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Do scrapers download whole videos?

I don't know, each one is designed for a specific purpose. Some people might scrape for archival reasons, some might do it for AI training data, some might do it to build analytic user profiles, some might do it for academic reasons, some might do it to build search indices. I can't think of a great reason to just download all the videos, but people do really dumb shit when someone else is paying the bill.

I don't know where to begin for traffic monitoring like that. HetrixTools?'

Unfortunately I don't have any great recommendations here. I'm looking into this myself. Ideally you'll want a tool that can monitor the network interface and aggregate data on bandwidth per IP or MAC. That will at least give you an idea if anything seems egregious. (if it is by IP, it could be a large number of machines behind a NAT though, like a university or something). ntopng has piqued my interest. I might try it out and report back.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago

Ntopng seems useful. They're really trying to push licenses for "enterprise" features, but the "community edition" is available under the GPLv3 license and allows you to track throughput to remote hosts. Not sure how much of a performance impact it makes.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 weeks ago

Grafana & Prometheus is a good place to start, PeerTube even has a guide on how to monitor your PeerTube instance with them https://docs.joinpeertube.org/maintain/observability

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I devote exactly half of it to a nginx cache for the object storage. It caches for up to a year.

I bet there's a ton of low hanging fruit optimizations to be done with the caching

I couldn't find Nginxs replacement policy but I'm going to assume it's LRU like 99% of everything else

Can I ask what your current caching strategy is? Like what/how things gets cached

I.e. what types of files, if any custom settings like this file needs to be requested at least 5 times before nginx caches it (default is once), etc.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 3 weeks ago

welp you made tankietube now make a mythical compression algo tankiepress or something

[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

What did you do??? Do you own fucking YouTube or something???

[–] [email protected] 59 points 3 weeks ago

TankieTanuki owns TankieTube, which is like YouTube but better

[–] [email protected] 48 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 49 points 3 weeks ago

When I knew TankieTanuki he was just a refuse varmint, now he's a big shot webhoster.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Is this because of all the remote transcoding, or are you getting that much traffic?

[–] [email protected] 31 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Both.

When you enable "remote runners" in the PeerTube settings, the server stops transcoding entirely. In order to continue using the server CPU, it's necessary to register the local machine as a "remote" runner.

I did that last week. Now all the transcoding is run as a separate process by a dedicated Linux user, prunner. However, when I first registered the local runner, I said "send all the finished files to https://tankie.tube" because that's what the docs said. That had the effect of doubling all the transcoding traffic to the server because it was sending files to itself via the public net. Very bad. so I changed it to http://127.0.0.1:9000.

Now there is no more doubling of the traffic, but it's apparently still too much traffic. If I were to add any truly "remote" runners, it would increase the traffic even more.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 weeks ago

Dear Tankie

Stop uploading communism or i will start to sharpen the stakes

Vlad

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Vlad Alexandru agony-consuming

Average Ramnicu Valcea resident

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago

real Tepes hours

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

Did you buy hosting from some person trying to do a startup in their college dorm?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Have you asked the peertube people?