Specifically the database backend. Is the polling for notifications causing more database load? From my personal testing, lemmy.ml has the same performance problems with 0.17.4 that it does with 0.18.1 and I haven’t seen anything in the code changes that are that significant with database.
Two major problems that I think continues to slow development and rework of the internal performance problems.
Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml have substanial amount of data in their database. Users, votes, posts, comments - that is difficult to match. New instances for testing start with no data.
Federation activity to peer servers. The big sites have far more servers to share far more communities than any small testing server.
It would be ideal if there was a open test server that had huge amounts of data in the database and significant federation activity - and opened up the server logs so that we can all get our eyes on what is actually going on within the Rust code.
Lemmy.world doesn’t have but 60% of the data that Lemmy.ml has.