I already get rate-limited like crazy on lemmy and there are only like 60,000 users on my instance. Is each instance really just one server or are there multiple containers running across several hosts? I’m concerned that federation will mean an inconsistent user experience. Some instances many be beefy, others will be under resourced… so the average person might think Lemmy overall is slow or error-prone.
Reddit has millions of users. How the hell is this going to scale? Does anyone have any information about Lemmy’s DB and architecture?
I found this post about Reddit’s DB from 2012. Not sure if Lemmy has a similar approach to ensure speed and reliability as the user base and traffic grows.
https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/reddits-database-has-two-tables/
I’m thinking something like a large postgresQL database box, then front facing servers running ldirectord or a similar HA load balancer to be able to add instances as necessary. However, my skills here are 20 years out of date so I’m sure there’s better out there.
Some people are already deploying it with Kubenetes, pretty much handles load balancing and even scaling up and down automatically out of the box if you’re set up in the cloud. Pretty much a long solved problems.
Lots of nice free load balancers these days: HAproxy, NGINX, Traefik, I’ve even seen people do it in kernel with eBPF or iptables.