Status update July 4th
Just wanted to let you know where we are with Lemmy.world.
Issues
As you might have noticed, things still won’t work as desired… we see several issues:
Performance
- Loading is mostly OK, but sometimes things take forever
- We (and you) see many 502 errors, resulting in empty pages etc.
- System load: The server is roughly at 60% cpu usage and around 25GB RAM usage. (That is, if we restart Lemmy every 30 minutes. Else memory will go to 100%)
Bugs
- Replying to a DM doesn’t seem to work. When hitting reply, you get a box with the original message which you can edit and save (which does nothing)
- 2FA seems to be a problem for many people. It doesn’t always work as expected.
Troubleshooting
We have many people helping us, with (site) moderation, sysadmin, troubleshooting, advise etc. There currently are 25 people in our Discord, including admins of other servers. In the Sysadmin channel we are with 8 people. We do troubleshooting sessions with these, and sometimes others. One of the Lemmy devs, @nutomic@lemmy.ml is also helping with current issues.
So, all is not yet running smoothly as we hoped, but with all this help we’ll surely get there! Also thank you all for the donations, this helps giving the possibility to use the hardware and tools needed to keep Lemmy.world running!
This is the level of transparency that most companies should strive for. Ironic that in terms of fixing things, volunteer and passion projects seem to be more on top of issues compared to big companies with hundreds of employees.
You said it: passion projects. While being paid is surely a motivator, seeing your pet project take off the way Lemmy is can be so intoxicating and rewarding! I plan to donate as soon as I get paid on Friday! I want to see this succeed, even if it is just to spite Reddit, and I am willing to pay for the pleasure.
Thanks for all of your effort. Even though we are on different instances, it’s important for the Fediverse community that you succeed. You are doing valuable work, and I appreciate it.
Not just that, but the code contributed to Lemmy by this debugging will make Lemmy run faster for everyone on every instance, which is makes the ecosystem that much better.
good news, a fix might be in the works: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3482
Yes phiresky is working with us improving performance, has helped a lot so far! (We’re now running a custom build with some of his improvements)
Just tried upvoting most of the comments here, and this time all of the upvotes went through and were extremely fast! No more 502 errors!
I’ve noticed lemmy.world has been much more responsive today so something seems to be working!
It’s working, it’s working!
Thanks for sharing. It was very interesting to see the graphs showing the before and after.
I’m just excited to be back in the Wild West again – all of the big players had bumps, at least this one is working to fix them.
And giving updates!
I’d rather have to deal with hiccups and bumps along the way, because the community only grows more each time.
Yee-haw, mother fuckers.
I still remember early reddit days of 502 it went through, 504 try once more.
Early? Haha, reddit still shits the bed regularly
I am very forgiving of the bugs I encounter on Lemmy instances because Lemmy is still growing and it’s essentially still in beta. I am totally unforgiving of Reddit crashing virtually every day after almost two decades.
Still a better product than Reddit Mobile lol
The need to restart server every so often to avoid excessive ram usage bit is very interesting to me. This sounds like some issue with memory management. Not necessarily a leak, but maybe something like server keeping unnecessary references so the object cannot be dropped.
Anyway, from my experience Rust developers love debugging such kind of problems. Are Lemmy Devs aware of this issue? And do you publish server usage logs somewhere to look deeper into that?
server keeping unnecessary references so the object cannot be dropped
You indeed just described a memory leak :D
Oh they’re well aware, there’s a few tickets open.
For example there was some stuff about rate limiting using a lot of memory: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3111
How can I donate to lemmy.world?
Just look at the sidebar:
Donations
If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the mastodon. world donation URLs:https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
https://patreon.com/mastodonworldNot an expert, but here is where I set up a recurring donation. Apparently Mastadon.world and Lemmy.world are run by the same admins. Took me a while to understand this, please correct me if I’m wrong.
By moving to another instance
Thanks again for all the hard work on Lemmy World. It feels fast today
That is, if we restart Lemmy every 30 minutes. Else memory will go to 100%
Lemmy has a memory leak? Or, should I say, a “lemmory leak”?
A pretty bad one at that…
But… but… Rust…
Rust makes holes and that’s how leaks happen
Rust protects you from segfaulting and trying to access deallocated memory, but doesn’t protect you from just deciding to keep everything in memory. That’s a design choice. The original developers probably didn’t expect such a deluge of users.
Leaking memory is safe
Rust’s memory safety guarantees make it difficult, but not impossible, to accidentally create memory that is never cleaned up (known as a memory leak). Preventing memory leaks entirely is not one of Rust’s guarantees in the same way that disallowing data races at compile time is, meaning memory leaks are memory safe in Rust. We can see that Rust allows memory leaks by using Rc<T> and RefCell<T>: it’s possible to create references where items refer to each other in a cycle. This creates memory leaks because the reference count of each item in the cycle will never reach 0, and the values will never be dropped.
I’m calling it - if there’s actually a memory leak in the Rust code, it’s gonna be the in memory queues because the DB’s iops can’t cope with the number of users.
I think I found what eats the memory. DB iops isn’t the cause - looks like the server doesn’t reply before all the database operations are done. The problem is the unbounded queue in the activitypub_federation crate, spawned when creating the ActivityQueue struct. The point is, this queue holds all the “activities” - events to be sent to federated instances. If, for whatever reason, the events aren’t delivered to all the federated servers, they are retried with an exponential backoff for up to 2.5 days. If even a single federated instance is unreachable, all events remain in memory. For a large instance, this will eat up the memory for every upvote/downvote, post or comment.
Lemmy needs to figure out a scalable eventual consistency algorithm. Most importantly, to store the messages in the DB, not in memory.
You should take this entire comment and paste it in as a issue on the Lemmy Github Issues page.
I think the devs have been aware of the issue, theoretically, for a while. A proper solution requires some significant changes, so it was being postponed because this wasn’t considered urgent.
You should consider bringing this up at !lemmyperformance@lemmy.ml
Lemmy has a memory leak? Or, should I say, a “lemmory leak”?
A lemmory meek, obviously!
Wait isn’t lemmy written in rust how do you create a memory leak in rust? Unsafe mode?
let mut memory_leak = Vec::<u8>::new(); loop { memory_leak.push(0); }That’s not a memory leak though. That’s just hording memory. Leaked memory is inaccessible.
In the example it’s inaccessible.
It’s not. The vec is still accessible and if it goes out of scope rust automatically clears the memory.
But it will never fall out of scope because of the loop
Exactly but it’s still accessible since it’s in scope.
Exactly.
i just wanted to thank you for doing your best to fix lemmy.world as soon as possible.
but please, don’t feel forced to overwork yourselves. i understand you want to do it soon so more people can move from Reddit, but i wouldn’t like that Lemmy software and community developers overwork and feel miserable, as those things are some of the very motives you escaped from Reddit in first place.
in my opinion, it would be nice that we users understand this situation and, if we want lemmy so bad, we actively help with it.
this applies to all lemmy instances and communities, ofc. have a nice day you all! ^^
Plus, slow steady growth means eventual success. Burnout is very real if you never take a break.
so true, pal! slowly, with patience, no rushing, putting love into it, organizing ourselves, working smart is better than working hard and fast.
because of the federated nature of fediverses like Lemmy, it is very possible that many people are doing the very same task without even knowing they are duping each other’s efforts.
and that’s sad because if they knew, they could be teaming up, or splitting the task in two, in order to avoid wasting different efforts into dupe results.
i have learnt a thing or two about burnout, it’s better for me to make 40% planning, and 40 % self-care and so the 20 % of execution becomes piece of cake.
but this is just my opinion. anyway, please take care, pals <3
Thanks for giving us all these updates all the time!
I feel that lemmy runs smoothly the past few hours with very few hiccups and mostly on the upvoting and commenting side. I encountered no issues yet on the loading of the post.
Thank you so much for all your hard work.
Agreed, it seems fine now, makes such a difference to whether I want to keep interacting with Lemmy.
I want this to succeed so badly. I truly feel like it’s going to be sink or swim and will reflect how all enshitification efforts will play out.
Band together now and people see there’s a chance. Fail and we are doomed to corporate greed in every facet of our lives.
Wow. Drama! Chill bruh. They’ll get there. If it takes too long for some, they can switch to other instances.
That’s just a lemming living up to their name!
I’m here for the drama too!
Fuck the cleanliness of the corporate web.
I can’t imagine how hard it is to rua server that has influx of large users. I Thank you for your hard work to run and maintain this instance. Hope it works out well and future will be a smooth sail.
Thank you so much for your hard work and for fixing everything tirelessly, so that we can waste some time with posting beans and stuff lol.
Seriously, you’re doing a great job <3
Great distraction from the collapse
