TortoiseWrath

Ehhhhhhh. Using a relational database for Lemmy was certainly a choice, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad one.

Within Lemmy, by far the most expensive part of the database is going to be comment trees, and within the industry the consensus on the best database structure to represent these is… well, there isn’t one. The efficiency of this depends way more on how you implement it within a given database model than on the database model itself. Comment trees are actually a pretty difficult problem; you’ll notice a lot of platforms have limits on comment depth, and there’s a reason for that. Getting just one level of replies to work efficiently can be tricky, regardless of the choice of DBMS.

Looking at the schema Lemmy uses, I see a couple opportunities to optimize it down the road. One of the first things I noticed is that comment replies don’t seem to be directly related back to the top-level post, meaning you’re restricted to a breadth-first search of the comment tree at serving time. Most comments will be at pretty shallow depths, so it sometimes makes sense to flatten the first few levels of this structure so you can get most relevant comments in a single query and rebuild the tree post-fetching. But this makes nomination (i.e. getting the “top 100” or whatever comments to show on your page) a lot more difficult, so it makes sense that it’s currently written the way it is.

If it’s true (as another commenter said) that there’s no response caching for comment queries, that’s a much bigger opportunity for optimization than anything else in the database.

Oh shit does lemmy not have response caching? Yeah, that’s gonna be an issue pretty soon.

hh3tf.golden.exe is 1536 bytes, compiled from C, and comes with a comma and exclamation point:

I’m actually surprised it’s that large, but Windows gonna Windows.

I wonder if YouTube still uses Python to this day

We do not.

One more anecdote for y’all to pluralize into data: my instance is currently using 915Mi of storage for pictrs and 976Mi for postgres, roughly 650Mi of RAM (including postgres), and negligible CPU

My other reason is that it’s the only way to know I picked an instance that isn’t going to just go away without me and take my account with it. It will be an interesting day when the first major lemmy instance goes down…

Yeah, but I think the current iteration of Chat is the first one to be offered as an enterprise product, and the first one universally used internally (even some SRE teams are now using Chat by default instead of IRC). I could be wrong - there are some that are before my time.

Not relevant to lemmy (yet), but this does break down a bit at very large scales. (Source: am infra eng at YouTube.)

System architecture (particularly storage) is certainly by far the largest contributor to web performance, but the language of choice and its execution environment can matter. It’s not so important when it’s the difference between using 51% and 50% of some server’s CPU or serving requests in 101 vs 100 ms, but when it’s the difference between running 5100 and 5000 servers or blocking threads for 101 vs 100 CPU-hours per second, you’ll feel it.

Languages also build up cultures and ecosystems surrounding them that can lend themselves to certain architectural decisions that might not be beneficial. I think one of the major reasons they migrated the YouTube backend to C++ isn’t really anything to do with the core languages themselves, but the fact that existing C++ libraries tend to be way more optimized than their Python equivalents, so we wouldn’t have to invest as much in developing more efficient libraries.

lol, my bad. i replied from the wrong account and tried to delete it and do it again but I guess it didn’t delete the first one fully

I was thinking about writing a script that just fetches the community lists from some popular instances then searches them on mine…

I moved my .dev to NameSilo to live with the rest of my domains, since luckily that’s allowed now. See here for the list of options if you have any Google Registry domains (.dev, .app, .new, etc.). Make sure to uncheck “Show preferred partners only” if you don’t care which ones have given Google more money or whatever that means.

FWIW the comms I’ve seen suggest Squarespace has agreed to actually offer standalone domains as part of this deal… I doubt that’s binding in the long term though, and they’ll certainly want to get people to use their signature site builder product.

I know Google Cloud Domains (previously separate from Google Domains) is being deprecated too, but I don’t know if those domains are also automatically moving to Squarespace. Seems weird if they do that, since it would drive people directly to one of Cloud’s main competitors… but they’re driving people away from Cloud anyway with this so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I imagine the ones the middle managers use internally are safe… that is, the main Workspace apps (I think that’s what they’re called now? you know… Docs, Sheets, Forms, Slides, Calendar, Chat).

And the few Cloud services that are actually running things like YouTube (Spanner, … actually I think that’s the only publicly available one)

My posts are going to be used for LLM training regardless.

If you can read this, the Ansible playbook mostly Just Worked™ to install it on a clean Debian VPS. I actually did start over at one point because I wanted to change the domain name after learning there’s not currently any way to use different domains for the UI and usernames like there is in Mastodon (relevant github issue); from that, I suspect it should be good about not clobbering anything except maybe SSL certs for existing nginx sites.

For some reason, my nginx also now seems to try to use the cert lemmy installed by default, even on a site I just set up to only listen on port 80 (http://gillen.dev). So that’s kinda weird, but just installing a new cert for such a site with certbot fixes it (https://sdg.fyi).

It still seems to be struggling a little bit: votes and comments on this thread are taking a looong time to show up here (your comment just got here and it says it was from 24 minutes ago)… or maybe I’m just impatient :)

Of course, the real test will be when it comes time to update to the next Lemmy version…

This is the main reason I’m here - I realized that with an account on lemmy.world or something some admin somewhere could just unilaterally decide to defederate some major server and I wouldn’t be able to get to half the communities I like anymore. And lo and behold, beehaw.org defederated lemmy.world while I was setting this up.

I always thought this mechanic would drive a lot of people away from the fediverse, but mastodon still seems to be pretty active after the mass migrations from Tumblr and Twitter so what do I know?

WOOOO I had to mash “search” for a while but I think I’m here now