this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Would a good solution be to just deffer changes to data with something like Apache Kafka? Or changing to something that can be scaled, like cockroach db or neondb? I also heard ScyllaDB could be a great alternative, mostly from reading the discord technical blog.
It's not the tech here. Postgres can scale both vertically and horizontally (yes there are others that can scale easier or in different factors of CAP).
The problem is how the data is being stored and accessed. Lemmy is doing some really inefficient data access and it's causing bottlenecks under load.
Lemmy (unfortunately) just wasn't ready for this level of primetime yet... It has a number of issues that are going to be quite tricky to fix now that it's seen such wide adoption (database migrations are tricky on their own, doing so on a production site even harder, doing so on 8k+ independent production sites... Sounds like a nightmare)
Can you elaborate on what Lemmy is doing that's inefficient? I'm working on a database application myself, so the more I know about optimizing database queries, the better.
Sorry, I assumed it was just an issue with the tech not scaling well, really shows how little I know about architecture haha.
Not that I see. A database like PostgreSQL can work, but you have to be really careful how new data flows into the database. As writing to the database involves record locking and invalidates the cache for output.
Taking the bulk data, comments and postings, outside PostgreSQL would help. Especially since what most people are reading on a Reddit-like website is content form the last 48 hours... and your caching potential dies way down as people move on to the newer content.
The comments alone are the primary problem, there are lot of them on each posting and they are bulky data. Also comments are unique data.
hmmm a good approach would be to maybe split comments into some kind of database regions and just load as they're needed instead of loading them all at once