I imagine there’s excitement for the increase of activity but worries about the potential toxic side of Reddit coming along too.

I’d especially be interested in the Lemmy devs’ opinions.

  • Valmond
    4·
    2 years ago

    Any idea what hardware specs you need to run an instance? Like for 100 users, 1.000, 10k etc?

    Or the hardware lemmy.ml runs on and the userbase?

    • darkfoe@lemmy.serverfail.party
      11·
      2 years ago

      It’s still a little unknown at this time what you need to handle X number of users, beyond a few hundred. Beehaw.org is pretty open about what they’re using though in their financial statements if you’re curious, but there’s of operational optimization being tried out to see what’ll help.

      The stack is: postgres, pictrs, lemmy (Rust), lemmy-ui (nodejs), and nginx. RAM usage isn’t too bad, but so far I see CPU and disk I/O (pictrs) as the limitation. Websockets are being removed which was another hurdle - would cause nginx worker threads to max out and drop instances off.

      I’m on a 6$/month droplet as a reference for my single user instance and I’m subbed to a boatload of communities. So far I’m not having problems, but I made a 2GB swapfile for safety if RAM somehow spiked. CPU usage for me tends to spike when a community is being loaded for the first time due to image processing, but otherwise things are pretty idle.

      • TheDude@sh.itjust.works
        5·
        2 years ago

        I’m looking forward to the increase in traffic tbh. I have setup a pretty beefy instance with a ton of monitoring on it so that hopefully after the wave I can create a nice write up on what it would take to scale lemmy in the future. I’ll keep everyone updated with the results!

        • darkfoe@lemmy.serverfail.party
          4·
          2 years ago

          Yeah, this is a golden moment for those of us who like to learn from sudden heavy load on server software! There are not very many teachable moments like this out there, so I’m trying to soak everything up for work experience

      • Valmond
        2·
        2 years ago

        I have an i-5 6core dell sitting so why shouldn’t I spin up a node?

        I’m mostly worried about maintenance and it breaking down one day, how do you deal with that in a good way?

        • darkfoe@lemmy.serverfail.party
          3·
          2 years ago

          Regular backups should do the job. It’s all run in docker instances with mapped volumes, so you can just backup those contents regularly and roll-back worst case if things completely pooped out. Otherwise maintenance isn’t really much worse than a normal webserver - great for learning Linux CLI if you’re not already familiar.

          No reason you shouldn’t spin up a node though! The more the better - lets load spread out.