this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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I don't understand personally why Lemmy.world isn't utilizing load balancing (specifically, horizontal load balancing). Is it due to budget concerns?
There are challenges with horizontal scaling due to the way that Lemmy is architected. Sounds like this will be a priority for them to improve
For all we know it's hosted in an old laptop in someone's basement right?
The dev, Ruud (User Profile), who runs Lemmy.world also runs another Fediverse instance, Mastodon.world. If you go to Mastodon.World you can see their blog posts which talks about their infrastructure and Expenses.
https://blog.mastodon.world/welcome-lemmy-world
https://blog.mastodon.world/april-and-may-2023-financial-update
The VPS package they’re hosted on runs for almost $600 a month with a massive CPU, memory, and storage. I suspect now the expenses are increasing due to the massive influx of users. Now imagine Reddit's costs serving over a billion people across the planet - Multi-million dollar contracts between Reddits and other corporations, tens of thousands of full-time salary jobs of engineers and devs, etc.
Running a Lemmy instance on an old laptop is extremely trivial. But serving Lemmy to tens of thousands of users is expensive and difficult. Lemmy will improve over time and hopefully we’ll see load balancing and horizontal scaling in the future. I’d love to see additional containers get spun up during large spikes of capacity.