In the sign up process, it discourages using the primary srever. In the docs it talks about performance limitations. In contast Mastadon does not do this. Worse yet, most people think of a single centralized server. And this server only has some 500+ active users a month. Maybe 10 times that many lurkers?

While I love the Lemmy design, and the community looks great, I fear that it does not scale. Worse yet I suspect that the Activity Pub protocol is grossly inefficient for Reddit style applications. Maybe a publish subscribe message broker, like MQTT would be much more efficient.

So what is gong on here. Is this an issue? Am I correct to be scared about Lemmy scalability.

And just for context, I think you are totally on the right track, way ahead of all ofther reddit clones, but maybe just a little off course. Can you crank up performance?

  • @nutomicMA
    14•3 years ago

    So far there are no performance problems at all. Lemmy.ml runs on a dual core vps and only uses like 5-10% of each core (load average around 0.5). The reason we want to discourage use of lemmy.ml is that it makes for an unhealthy ecosystem if the majority of users are all on a single instance. I also dont think that federation would be a performance problem unless you have a really huge instance. If we run into any performance issues, then Rust will give us a lot of ways to optimize that.

      • @nutomicMA
        4•3 years ago

        Rust is just a really nice language (no null pointers or anything similar). We arent using it for performance reasons, thats just a nice bonus.

        Once this is implemented, large threads can be handled much more efficiently.

      • @mesamunefire
        3•3 years ago

        I used to host a mastodon instance for just one user, me. It really struggled unfortunately in both speed and space requirements.

        I wish they had an option to block all bots from the platform. I can block individuals and instances, but bots would still pop up like crazy.

      • Kinetix
        1•3 years ago

        From lemmy.ca:

        USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND

        lemmy 17645 0.3 0.3 672368 98876 ? Ssl Aug03 154:51 node dist/js/server.js

        lemmy 20959 0.4 0.6 4127676 210048 ? Ssl Aug03 169:59 /home/lemmy/lemmy/target/release/lemmy_server

        pictrs 32164 0.0 11.4 10599856 3769764 ? Ssl Jul28 18:50 /home/lemmy/pictrs/pict-rs/pict-rs

        iframely 20977 0.0 0.1 901704 55368 ? Ssl Jul08 3:25 iframely

        Make of it what you will. :-)

    • @UncensoredNewsOP
      4•3 years ago

      WOW. 100MB is tiny. but Lemmy requires postgress, and a quick google search says Postgres requires minimum of 2 GB or RAM.