So after we’ve extended the virtual cloud server twice, we’re at the max for the current configuration. And with this crazy growth (almost 12k users!!) even now the server is more and more reaching capacity.
Therefore I decided to order a dedicated server. Same one as used for mastodon.world.
So the bad news… we will need some downtime. Hopefully, not too much. I will prepare the new server, copy (rsync) stuff over, stop Lemmy, do last rsync and change the DNS. If all goes well it would take maybe 10 minutes downtime, 30 at most. (With mastodon.world it took 20 minutes, mainly because of a typo :-) )
For those who would like to donate, to cover server costs, you can do so at our OpenCollective or Patreon
Thanks!
This server can easily host 1M users.
Most stress on the server comes from all the signups and newcomers posting a lot. After a while that becomes less. On Mastodon, the first days in November I had over 100k active users. Now I have 165k accounts but around 32k active.
And I’m sure the Lemmy devs will also improve the performance of the site. They never really had to, a few days ago the total number of Lemmy users over all instances was 7k.
Is data actually replicated among the different servers? Is (data from other servers) just cached temporarily or is it permanently stored on local DBs?
I checked lemmy docs but I couldn’t find a clear answer.
I was wondering what kind of strain the immense influx of people could put on network and DBs other than just servers, specifically in case of the number of servers raising a lot, not just users on a single server.