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/
As far as I’m aware lemmy does not support load balancing or high availability as it currently strands. But development is still in its infancy and I’m sure that’s a top priority
I don’t see any reasons why you couldn’t run more copies of the backend and frontend, as long as it uses the database properly. It should scale horizontally decently for a while.
At work I have clusters that runs 40-50 application servers all going to one database and handles millions of requests daily, on a pretty inefficient PHP application. Lemmy being in Rust, it can handle a lot of traffic.
Given the frontend is in nodejs, I suspect we’ll need to scale up the frontend first, which should be no problem at all, just many copies of the frontend to fewer copies of the backend to fewer copies of the database. Maybe slap Cloudflare in front at some point.
It will probably get costly to run before it becomes hard technically to scale up.
I mean it can….it’s just very DB heavy. It would be on an admin to scale up and scale out a single instance witb multiple dbs, replication etc.
It would be nice to be able to assign dbs to a task (ie: one for federation updates, one for local community posts, one to service web requests. There may be a way to do that already but I’m not aware, it may need to be in code.
Also syncing/federation across instances seems to be a mixed bag. And my instance will sometimes waste threads trying to sync with instances they have come and gone. As a result some communities id love to see updates on don’t come through.
Ideally they figure a way to continue to optimize federation and allow smaller instances to just pick up the load.
Mine is open, but I’m not getting any registration requests. I’m not upset about it but their main join page still seems to optimize for larger instances. It would make more sense to optimize for smaller ones to better distribute load. And focus dev work on better l/smoother syncing between federated instances.
Some locking down is a concern. I would love to see a lemmy of trust group if that came to pass. Where you can join the group and federate. My biggest concern with open federation is the legal risk of things like CSAM or CP getting synced onto your instances even if you have the nsfw box unchecked.
It’s not only about scaling a single instance, but scaling the fediverse.
Currently, each instance sends all events to all federated instances. That means, essentially each instance needs to store and process a significant part of the entire fediverse. That’s insane and has to be addressed.
