We’ll give the upgrade new try tomorrow. I’ve had some good input from admins of other instances, which are also gonna help troubleshoot during/after the upgrade.
Also there are newer RC versions with fixed issues.
Be aware that might we need to rollback again, posts posted between the upgrade and the rollback will be lost.
We see a huge rise in new user signups (duh… it’s July 1st) which also stresses the server. Let’s hope the improvements in 0.18.1 will also help with that.
PSA from Admin Team: The update completed roughly two hours ago. Since that time, the Admin team (and other site admins) have been working on the noted performance issues. We believe we have found a solution, but we still need time to test this out. You may still see brief outages and differences in performance as we are testing different configurations. We are trying to prevent rolling back.
While I know this can be frustrating - especially today - please keep in mind we have a team of volunteer techies (from around the globe!) collaborating on this issue. It is an inspiring situation. Also keep in mind that lemmy.world is quite a bit larger (and more active than any other instance). As such, we are a bit of a ‘test instance’ in regards to high volume requests. This is just part of the growing pain. We appreciate your understanding.
@ruud@lemmy.world will provide a debrief once we have completed testing.
We are happy to have all of you! Do what is needed to make this place the best. Even reddit sucked in the early days.
502 it went through, 504 try once more
Thanks for the kind words! Yeah, there are definite growing pains, and likely will be for some time (just do to the codebase we are working with, understandably). We have a really solid group though heading up lemmy.world though so we will be just fine ;)
Not sure if this is a good place to ask but it was on my mind these days, with the big user boom and probably most of it being directed at .world - should some of us consider moving to other instance to make room? Would it make sense? Would it help? Or are you ok having so many users under the .world umbrella (possibly causing even greater flood with people seeing it is the “main” (with biig quotes there) instance?
Technically speaking, yes, a portion of our issues are due to the highest user base of an Lemmy instance. So in theory, if half of our users dispersed to other instances, we would likely see some performance improvement here. However, lemmy.world is intended to be an accessible instance for the general population. The server itself that is running lemmy.world is beyond spec’d to handle much more than this user load. We are running up against code-level issues that we may or may not be able to get around with our internal configurations. This is just part of developing software in an environment were you go from a few thousand users total to hundreds of thousands in the space of a few weeks. There is no directive to have users create accounts on new instances, though if you are looking for an immediate performance improvement, that may be your best option currently. That is up to you to decide :)
Gotcha. So pretty much if I want to personally avoid the growing pains (or possibly ease them for others), I should consider it, but doesn’t particularly help you directly. Thanks for clarifying and thanks for all the work you all put into it!
Yup you nailed it. For additional context, Ruud is running an almost identical server for his Mastadon.world server which has 160k users. Relatively speaking, these are large, performant, and expensive servers. They can absolutely handle the current user influx we are getting from the Reddit exodus. Are hands are tied by software limitations unfortunately. I can confidently tell you were are constantly in communication about ways we can amplify user experience with the tools that we do have access to. For instance, this status page was recently spun up which you can access anytime you think there might be server issues to help confirm that what you are seeing is recognized at a server level. Things like that.
All that being said, for users who are looking for a smoother experience right now, I can recommend lemm.ee as a solid home as well. Their admin Sunaurus has been very active and helpful throughout this process and handles his instance very professionally. He is essentially another Ruud (though Ruud is the best! ;)). Just something to keep in mind going forward as I can’t make any promises about the time frames for these issues being resolved. Hopefully once we get contact back from the Lemmy devs we can start expediting a resolution. They have a lot on their plates right now though, haha, so we will see. Cheers!
Thanks for the additional context, you guys rock!
It’s not just performance issues (which seem to be solved right now?), the login form doesn’t work at all.
The login form should be related to the overall spiking we were seeing, though I can’t say we had conclusive evidence of that. I have been able to get it to load properly with a few refreshes. Maybe try clearing your cache? I had to do that several times during testing.
Server feels a lot better now than it did an hour ago. Comments are going through quickly and upvotes are working for me.
I’ve noticed that voting is slow, joining/leaving communities is slow (or doesnt happen at all in some cases), but commenting is very fast now.
Upvote are still slow. I’m testing the comment right now.
Ok, commented are fine ( edit too) 👍
Finally able to register. Glad to be here.
TFW you run a small server with an open source social platform for shits any giggles and one month it explodes a thousandfold because of one greedy pig boy.
I’ve spent almost an hour trying to just to sign up. Poor servers. This is my first comment here and I sincerely hope this takes off in the best way.
Been here for a month~. Other than a few growing pains it’s been pretty smooth. An initial learning curve on the whole instance/lemmy/fediverse thing and learning to sort by all/hot or active instead of just “local” to get ALL if the lemmy-verse instead of just your own instance. Once you learn how to use it it’s a much better experience the reddit. Right now it’s getting the reddit hug of death. But it will survive and flourish.
I’ve been on here almost a month and there are usually very few issues and the admin team are quick to troubleshoot when an issue does arise. It should calm down soon!
Heyo! Small update from someone who is watching the upgrade live; it’s ongoing still. Seems like they are still facing some performance issues. So grab your popcorn and wait! 🍿 (Btw, i am not a sysadmin, just a moderator)
Where do you look at it?
It’s on a private discord server for instance admins and mods, so not for public. Sorry :)
Alright, thank you for the update, hope everything goes well!
I’m a moderator, who should I reach out to to receive an invite to the discord? I want to post a new forum game to one of the communities I mod for, but I’m holding off until I can be sure this update is stable.
It should be good now. The discord server is only for people who help moderate the instance itself, and not community mods. I help with the moderation part. If you have questions then you can ask in the !support@lemmy.world or !moderators@lemmy.world communities. Sorry :)
Understood. Thanks!
Sigh, just like reddit. Private spaces that Plebs aren’t invited too / can’t access.
So, you think a public stream showing all backend infos including credentials to databases and stuff like that, is a good idea? 🤔
Plane lands and everyone is disembarking
Rest in peace Leslie Nielson you glorious comedic bastard.
Good luck.
You know, maybe I’m being overly dramatic, but I really feel like we’re at the beginning of something special. I realize that Lemmy has existed for some years, but the whole Reddit thing is really pushing it into the limelight, and it’s new to me (I joined just before the blackout).
Seeing all the developers and admins dealing with the inevitable bugs, working together to keep the federated instances operating together during a huge surge in users, like a flotilla of disparate ships lashed together facing a major storm - it makes me excited, nervous, and hopeful. I fully intend to support developers and instances financially, but also want to give a big “yay team” shout-out.
How loaded are the servers? It would be good to see it maybe in the instance sidebar or a website
Crossing my fingers, excited for the update
We have almost the same nickname!
So it was you took my normal username haha
Can’t upvote
Something tells me it will work this time.
Third times the charm, baby!
This is like that scene in a sci-fi movie where they’re trying to repair the ship mid-battle. Good luck!
I used to work with a guy who was a sysadmin for a moderately sized webhost in the mid-2000s when things like containers and cluster orchestrators didn’t exist and high availability/multi-master database systems were only really accessible to banks.
He once described patching the servers “like trying to change all the tires on a car without being allowed to pull over”.
Watching lemmy react realtime is hella interesting, good luck y’all!
Thank you for the heads-up. 🤙
A bit concerning perhaps hold this off for a week or so seems like this is very important moment for the users from r**dit to decide if they want to be here or not.
Bit afraid the application will break with all the new users. Hoping 0.18 could handle a bit more.
That’s why it has to be done today. At the moment, Jerboa instantly crashes when trying to access Lemmy, which will definitely scare away new users. My understanding is that this is because Lemmy.World is on version 17, but Jerboa requires instances to be on version 18 or higher. If successful, I believe this would fix the instant crash issue, so we’ll at least have an Android app working again.
Hopefully, these are just growing pains symptomatic of a site trying to deal with rapid growth and rapid improvements.
