volunteer run and volunteer paid servers sometimes go down. you may not be used to this happening with large, for-profit websites.
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
72 points (80.0% liked)
Fediverse
28444 readers
800 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I literally remember when sites like Reddit, Amazon, and even Google went down. We're so used to crazy uptimes that it's easy to forget that real servers and infrastructure have real problems.
I remember when 'literally' wasn't the only adverb people knew.
Do you literally remember it, or merely figuratively?
Well... technically....
🎶 “She is literally the Polaroid of perfection…” 🎶
I remember the "by what right do you exclude the population" video when Reddit was down. Good times long before the enshittification.
Edit: here's the video: https://youtu.be/KqRPOEa3P44?si=d5k94eccnJz7SauS
Who'd have guessed that volunteers without big bags of cash usually only actually have one or two actual servers running and they somehow can't afford a whole fleet of failover servers for when traffic gets too high.
Actually, I'm more used to the big sites going down, than small ones, but considering the fact that they are well-fed to come back online, compared to volunteer projects, just gave me some concerns
I totally understand, and it’s a valid concern. Without knowing anything about the admins who run this instance, it’s entirely possible that monitoring isn’t in place, or it is in place but notifications aren’t setup, or that is the case but people can’t respond to problems because they are at their day job, or they are responding to problems but solving those problems takes hours.. I’m speaking from personal experience running smaller projects for others. I was always very thankful to have users who understood these concerns, and I guess I try to gently remind users about the realities of the volunteer-run projects.
https://lemmy-world.statuspage.io/#month
They do a lot to be transparent and monitor availability.
There is an big usage jump before Xmas, I assume because of the recent lemmy version upgrade that many admins are saying uses more resources.
Give em some time, I'm sure there will be a patch soon.
Best part of the fediverse is you can just use a less popular server until things calm down.
I know I could, but many of the communities I follow, are on lemmy.world. So that doesn't mitigate the issue.
I don't think you understand how a federated system works based on that comment.
If the instance that hosts those communities goes down or struggles to stay afloat won't it struggle to federate its content outside its own network?
If I join another instance and lemmy.world is down, it's not like I can see the communities on lemmy.world.
Joining another instance as a user doesn't solve the problem that lemmy.world has bad uptime outside of the scope of reducing the load on LW itself
Federation takes almost no server load. It'd all the people loading images and comment threads that cause the server to slow down. Yes federation can break, especially due to unexpected code changes, but typically using a federated, lower user count site helps over all.
So what changed with Lemmy then? A few months back when I joined the ecosystem many instances including LW were unreachable for many hours a day. Joining up to a new instance didn't make LW content appear (as they were offline).
The issues today feel largely the same as a user, though less frequent. Am I misunderstanding?
0.19.1 has a problem that causes higher than expected server load, as illustrated in my first post showing their utilization graphs.
As for a few months ago, "someone" was DDoSing lemmy.world almost constantly but i guess they ran out of money or got bored.
It has? I haven't noticed. I'm guessing a lot of people have been bored over Christmas.
No i don't believe you'd have to worry about that.
Lemmy.world seems to get a lot of flack, which i guess comes with its size, but i am very happy with what they're doing. I think their team does a great job, thank you lemmy.world team!
Thanks, we're trying ❤️
Also to address the folks in the thread. We've noticed a ton of lag spikes over the last week. This is new to us. Things were very stable for a long time, even after the Pictrs upgrade. It might be v0.19.x related. We're going to run some tests later, but sometimes it's difficult for us to get to things due to work and family.
We're still here and listening 💪😎💪
I try and post stuff to Mastodon here and there.
When in doubt, check the dashboard 🤓
Yeah, I checked the status dasboard, mastodon and even the announcements, but nothing has been posted there. That's why I was a bit concerned.
Thx for the clarification 👍
World is probably overwhelmed again. I switched from world because of frequent outages. I don’t think you have to worry about UK scenario however, since the problem there was that the instance owner went awol.
Lemmy.World hasn't had many major issues since September, at least when I've been using it. It was really bad in the early days from June to August when they were constantly getting traffic + getting DDOS'd. It seems like they've had the best uptime overall, since then though
I'm a kbin refugee, so joined lemmy just recently. I mean, I had an account here, but never actually used it until now. And admittedly I also never faced issues here.
I actually have noticed a few times in the last few days that Lemmy world has timed out. But it has never actually been down for me. I would chalk it up to the higher resource usage of v0.19, hopefully that gets addressed by the Lemmy devs or World beefs things up a bit
Are you donating to Lemmy world? If you have concerns, start donating. Money makes the Lemmy.world stay online
Easy there, Chicken Little, the sky isn't falling. That was just an acorn.
I have noticed sometimes posting a comment will take longer but I just swap apps for a few when that happens.
You go when you’re ready lemmy pats mouse’s head
I use phtn.app mainly, and when encountering issues, I double-check lemmy.world
For me it is more often slow than actually down.
I don’t think lemmy.world is going anywhere, but I keep this lemmy.ca account as a backup just in case of .world outages. It’s been coming in handy the last couple of days.
glad to have you here :)
The instance has been down several times over the past few days?
That reads like a statement but you're asking a question.
Surely not as bad as asking a question in the form of a statement is it.
What do you mean.
Feddit.uk is still up you nonce. What are you on about?
There was a whole lot of drama around it a couple of days ago.
Think I'm getting deja vu or Mandela'd. I swear I read that week's ago and it sorted itself out.
So what's the new instance URL?
It eventually came back online, and the people behind the new one don't want to share the new instance until it's "ready". I don't understand it either.
Feddit.uk went down for a bit and no one knows why. We're seemingly back now though.
There is only one fully privileged admin (the original owner), and they're not super present. We have two other admins but they're restricted in what they can do (don't have access to the server itself I think?, can't upgrade).
A couple of users are setting up a new UK lemmy instance in response to this situation. One of those users is very keen for it to be a replacement, hence the posts. Not everyone is on board with it though. It's been put in hold while they iron some things out.
It's not an "official" replacement for feddit.uk in that sense, but it's another UK instance.
They need a dashingly handsome and charismatic leader such as me to show them the right path to glory. Unfortunately, I'm going to bed.
Dude, why'd you call me a nonce? Can't you just use normal insults like idiot or moron.
btw, since english isn't my first language I had to look it up with the expectation of it meaning something funny like a donkey... but that's just a disgusting language.
🤣
You misspelled, “Hey it seems like this thing I get to use for free needs some help. What can I do?”