After all these recent upgrades, updates and improvements, things are going veeert smoothly and fast!🔥 I think this comment I made about a week ago about experiencing slow responses is no longer valid!

Sal and anyone else who helped, you did a great job! Thank you!☺️

The instance has been updated to version 0.19.4!

You can see the official release post and notes here: https://lemmy.ml/post/16585359?scrollToComments=true

Since this update required some manual intervention anyway to update the database version, I took the opportunity to perform some overdue server maintenance and upgrades.

I have migrated the server to a more powerful configuration, and changed the way image files are being stored and served (object storage as opposed to filesystem storage).

I am also aware of some federation issues that have affected this and other instances. I am not sure whether this upgrade will deal with these problems automatically. I will be looking into it and hopefully will implement some solution soon.

Sorry for the downtime experienced in the past few days, but hopefully with the more powerful server the experience will be smoother and will remain so for a while.

For other admins and users interested, this is a bit of information about the server

The previous configuration:

Hosting provider: serverspace.io

8 GB RAM

4 Core CPU

50 Mbps network

400 GB SSD

Cost: $55 / month

The 400 GB SSD was being used to store both the server's database and the image files, and this component in isolation had a monthly cost of $36. I have migrated the images to an object storage provider ($6/month for 500 GB), and used the resources previously used for disk space to increase the other parameters. The new configuration is a lot better and less expensive.

New configuration:

Hosting provider: serverspace.io

Object storage provider: contabo.com

16 GB RAM

6 core CPU

50 Mbps network

100 GB SSD

500 GB Object storage

Cost: $47/month

Thanks a lot to the lemmy and pict-rs devs for the hard work they put into developing the infrastructure!

Hello everyone!

About 2 weeks ago, kbin.social went down due to maintenance issues, but it seems like federation hasn't been restored on this instance.

Specifically, I am subscribed to https://kbin.social/m/greece which federates with lemmy.world, but on this instance posts since 2 weeks ago and later dont seem to be federating.

Could you please check it and maybe re-enable it in the future?

(I know that currently there's a migration happening and we'll soon(?) update to 0.19.4, so this issue I'm pointing may have to wait till all these finish first (or updating may fix it without any extra work)).

Thank you for maintaining this instance! :)

I am performing a migration that moves the images files from disk storage to object storage. During this migration the image back-end needs to be turned off, and so images will not be accessible.

It should still be possible to comment.

I am not sure how long this will take.

This is part of a few optimizations that I plan to do before I upgrade the instance to version 0.19.4.

EDIT: Update, June 17 06:08 UTC

The transfer is working, but, after 12 hours, only ~50 GB have been transferred to Contabo's object storage (rate of about 1.16 MB/s). This is a lot slower than I imagined, and, if this rate continues, it will take about 3 more days to transfer the remaining 300 GB.

I am not sure if this slow rate is to be expected for moving files to object storage, or if something is wrong. If any of you has experience with this I would appreciate some tips! I have also asked in the Matrix chat in case someone there can provide me some feedback as well.

EDIT: Update, June 18, 07:44 UTC

Migration is done!

272.16 GB of image data has been transferred to object storage. This took about 37 hours. This means that transfer occurred at a rate of 2 MB/s. From other admin's experience, this transfer was quite slow. I am making use of Contabo as my object storage provider, and I suspect that the speed of the transfer was limited on their end. Another admin reported that they used backblaze b2 as the object storage provider and they experienced much faster transfers. All of this should have no influence on how the site performs from the end-user's point of view, I am documenting this for other admins who learn from other's experiences by searching through lemmy.

Object storage is a much cheaper way to save files in the cloud. Before this, I have stored the image files into the same SSD disk where the instance lives (rented from serverspace.io). The cost of this disk space goes up as the disk space needs increase. At the current disk size of 400 GB renting that space was costing $36/month and increased $0.9/mo for every 10 GB.

Object storage is a specialized way of saving and serving files from the cloud. Object storage is much cheaper, at €6 for 500 GB (from Contabo), and so it is a much more scalable way of storing the instance's files. The only reason I did not do this earlier was because I was not sure about how to do it and kept pushing it back. But now, it's done! I would recommend other admins to do this as early as possible, as migrating many files is more of a hassle than migrating a few.

Istill need to do a few more tasks (moving the instance to a new server with a smaller disk, upgrading the postgres database to be compatible with 0.19.4, changing the pict-rs database format from sled to postgres, and then upgrading to 0.19.4). But first I will let the instance run for a few days with object storage to make sure nothing is breaking.

Thank you for your patience :D

I was curious if anyone knows anything about the large delay for content coming in from lemmy.world? There's a discussion over there in one of fediverse communities and apparently we're like a week behind in receiving data.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/14134903

Sorry if this seems like a silly question but I have noticed over the last few months my feed(?) has started to act odd.

No matter what I do I don't see any posts from .world. I checked and mander does not seem to block .world (kinda why I liked this instance) and even weirder is how my feed gets filled with mostly .ml posts with almost no activity no matter how I sort.

This did not happen before and got me thinking, I don't even know how this works across federated instances.

Does anyone know:

• How does the sorting work on an instance? Is it all the same no matter what instance it is?

• Did anything change in the last few months, that would cause all .world (and I assume others) posts to not show?

• Other then changing instances what can I do to mitigate the weird slanted results?

Hello everyone,

A few people had a conversation in !fedigrow@lemm.ee about finding a new place to host a !dataisbeautiful community (see the thread here: https://mander.xyz/post/13861536)

We were thinking about mander.xyz as the theme of data seems to fit with the topics of the instance.

Would you be okay with us opening that community here?

I woke up and noticed that the server was down. I think that there were two different issues happening at once - one related to nginx, and the other related to a memory limit I recently set on a docker container. Issues are fixed now. Sorry!