this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023

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Outage today (2023-07-31) from 02:00 UTC - 05:45 UTC (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

38 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Lemmy.world has been down between 02:00 UTC and 05:45 UTC. This was caused by the database spiking to 100% cpu (all 32 cores/64 threads!) due to inefficient queries been fired to the db very often.

I’ve collected the logs and we’ll be checking how to prevent this. (And what caused this)

top 38 comments

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[–] [email protected] 96 points 1 year ago (3 children)

lemmy.world is a test environment for Lemmy developers.. 😅 Jokes aside, issue is an issue.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago

Well, as pretty much the biggest instance, it provides the best data for load-testing. 🫣

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago

All Lemmy instances are test environments right now. It's just that lemmy.world is being tested the hardest.

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

It's a good reminder that other large instances (lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, reddthat.com, sopuli.xyz) usually offer higher uptime while showing the same content as LW

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My issue with the smaller instances is that I enjoy browsing Local, and this is typically not as active or interesting on there. Is there a way to browse lemmy.world's Local from another instance?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Local makes sense for a country or field focused instance (queer rights, programming, even porn or whatever), not so much for generalist instances, unfortunately.

The way you use local only makes sense now as most of the communities are on LW. Once a few of them start to branch out (such as lemdro.id or startrek.website), if you want to see that content, you will either subscribe or use all

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Honestly I really don’t like that model. I only subscribe to communities I am active in and all is just porn spam. Local is 100% the best way to browse right now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

@Blaze @ReadyUser31 I love using all to find new stuff

[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Every Lemmy update:

"We fixed some performance issues by optimising some queries."

Also: "To balance it out, we added some new even more inefficient queries."

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Relevant.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How else are they supposed to patch things out? can't leave it up to fate, gotta make your own destiny!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Huh, isn't this instance only?

I just think tried from Connect for Lemmy in this comment and I couldn't.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

Thank you for the update!

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

(And what caused this)

Prediction: bad database programming. ;)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are we extracting enough value out of our volunteer developers and DBAs?!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The beatings will continue until morale improves!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Or clever denial of service attacks

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thanks for keeping us updated. FYI i noticed an issue there was an error message saying to check (the matix) and (somewhere else, Lemmy community support?). Both of them pointed to the same URL, but im sure they were meant to point to different places.

Edit. Happed again and I took notes. Both point to lemmy.ml community support

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It seems to start at roughly the same hour every day, at around 01:20 UTC

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Yup. We might be on to something now

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Another DDOS attack?

[+] [email protected] -20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

People move to smaller instances so that with such outage not everyone is affected. Use fediverse as its supposed to be used.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What's the name of the server you are running?

A large instance today will be a small instance in the future. There are hardly any users on lemmy compared to other more established platforms. So if lemmy is to ever handle a lot more users, stress testing the code makes a lot of sense.

What's going to happen in the future, do you expect there to be 50,000 servers? That's unrealistic.

[–] Sl00k 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Instances should be divided more into groups of Communities. So they theoretically don't grow infinitely, only as high as the "group" if communities grows. Ex. An NBA or Sports instance containing /c/NBA /c/NFL /c/NHL and all the related teams. Or similar to the programming.dev instance all being programming and development. While these would grow it would grow at a much slower rate than everything in one instance and be much more maintainable.

Of course this is somewhat of a social construct so everyone has to be in agreement with how to handle this and move accordingly, which won't happen.

Long-term long-term for federation there has to be a distributed computing solution that allows the users to contribute to hosting.

[–] ruffsl 2 points 1 year ago

Ex. An NBA or Sports instance containing /c/NBA /c/NFL /c/NHL and all the related teams.

https://fanaticus.social/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I can’t claim to know what the designers intended, but having users spread across a large numbers of servers is terribly inefficient for how Lemmy works: each server maintains a copy of each community that it’s users are subscribed to, and changes to those communities need to be communicated across each of those instances.

Given this architecture, it is much more efficient and robust to have users concentrate on what are effectively high performance cacheing servers, and communities spread out on smaller, interest focused instances.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I think this is the way things should move in the future. Have community vs user focuses on servers instead of having the same server get hit with both high community/comment usage and a server with lots of login/audit/user browsing requests. Servers with big communities could focus on stability and perfomance. Servers with users could focus on cool UIs and features for their users.