I spent several hours tracing in production (updating the code a dozen times with extra logging) to identify the actual path the lemmy_server code uses for outbound federation of votes to subscribed servers.

Major popular servers, Beehaw, Leemy.world, Lemmy.ml - have a large number of instance servers subscribing to their communities to get copies of every post/comment. Comment votes/likes are the most common activity, and it is proposed that during the PERFORMANCE CRISIS that outbound vote/like sharing be turned off by these overwhelmed servers.

pull request for draft:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/compare/main...RocketDerp:lemmy_comment_votes_nofed1:no_federation_of_votes_outbound0

EDIT: LEMMY_SKIP_FEDERATE_VOTES environment variable

  • Bread
    1·
    1 year ago

    I think what would be better is that instead of sharing votes/comments one at a time as they exist, is sharing them at a given interval. Like every 30 seconds share a larger packet of everything that happened within the last 30 seconds. Even having that time window be half a second would save a lot of processing.