this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Hi all,

Thank you for joining me here! It's great to see that we have a community that wants to grow in such a new and exciting manner.

As it is, I thought it would be a lot easier to do this by myself than it has been. So I'm asking for some help!

I have several things I need assistance with:

  • setting up and moderating a chat community, for those times when users are having issues with the website. I think it's up to the community what software we use, but I would probably prefer Discord. Since this is all federation though I completely understand if others want to use something like Zulip or Matrix! So let's just use what everyone wants. If you have an opinion please post below.
  • database stuff. I'm absolutely terrible at database stuff, and that is not an exaggeration. If anyone is willing to help it would be much appreciated. Currently I have a need to set up pgbouncer, or we should modify the lemmy source to allow for setting up a bouncer. I also want to set up read replicas so that we can distribute the load a bit more evenly. As it currently is, the site was simply set up with the lemmy-ansible script, so everything is running on a single box ๐Ÿ˜ฌ. If you know Rust and want to help modify the Lemmy source code for this, or you are a Database Admin and want to help, I'd very much appreciate it.
  • instance admins. I cannot be online constantly and I do have a day job. I'm getting messages and applications to join the instance along with needing to set up new communities, create and update rules, moderate, etc. I cannot handle this all alone.
  • I also need some general help.
    • email admin
    • migration of server to larger VPS (will have to bring the entire site down for this, unless someone wants to help set up a load balancer, a brand new box, and have some sort of migration strategy.)

If you want to help out on the server side of things I will want to know your real life persona, but for instance admins, chat mods, etc. I would just like to see some sort of comment history from you elsewhere.

And thank you once again, for helping create an inclusive community.

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[โ€“] RoundSparrow 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I suggestion that someone create a shell client stress-test app for the server API. Do a login, do a listing of postings, do a listing of communities, access a user profile, access a posting with 10 comments and another with 150 comments, etc.. Measure the response time and output it in a simple format that different admins can share and identify slow areas within the lemmy_server code.

The problem seems to be rooted in the lack of generating enough dummy test data for the lemmy-server app... it was only incrementally tested with low activity that was on the Lenny network before May 2023... now it is 100x or more data in the comments, upvotes, users, etc.

Each new comment and posting is making servers slower, the SQL is jut not scaling with the current table structures and JOIN usage.

[โ€“] terebat 4 points 1 year ago

+1.

This thing needs to be profiled and optimized. It should not be running into the ground with this low activity. Worse yet is federation reduces the speed by a ton too, but without it, instances have low activity.

I can help out here and try to do it in spare time, but no commitments/promises as I'm currently oncall at $dayjob.