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lemmyworld·Lemmy.World AnnouncementsbyRuud

Lemmy.world updated to 0.18.1-rc

Looks like it works.

Edit still see some performance issues. Needs more troubleshooting

Update: Registrations re-opened We encountered a bug where people could not log in, see https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3422#issuecomment-1616112264 . As a workaround we opened registrations.

Thanks

First of all, I would like to thank the Lemmy.world team and the 2 admins of other servers @[email protected] and @[email protected] for their help! We did some thorough troubleshooting to get this working!

The upgrade

The upgrade itself isn't too hard. Create a backup, and then change the image names in the docker-compose.yml and restart.

But, like the first 2 tries, after a few minutes the site started getting slow until it stopped responding. Then the troubleshooting started.

The solutions

What I had noticed previously, is that the lemmy container could reach around 1500% CPU usage, above that the site got slow. Which is weird, because the server has 64 threads, so 6400% should be the max. So we tried what @[email protected] had suggested before: we created extra lemmy containers to spread the load. (And extra lemmy-ui containers). And used nginx to load balance between them.

Et voilà. That seems to work.

Also, as suggested by him, we start the lemmy containers with the scheduler disabled, and have 1 extra lemmy running with the scheduler enabled, unused for other stuff.

There will be room for improvement, and probably new bugs, but we're very happy lemmy.world is now at 0.18.1-rc. This fixes a lot of bugs.

View original on lemmy.world

Really like seeing posts like this that explain what's going on. Thanks for all the hard work!

359

Good work upgrading! I can't imagine it being too easy with a big instance.

I had issues with comments not federating to my own instance before this update (showing 0 for hours). Opening up this up now showed most of them right away if not all. Hopefully that means 0.18.1 fixed a fair few issues people had with federation.

69

For everyone experiences issues during the login,

This is caused by an issue in the latest RC of the Lemmy UI. It's already been reported, and ruud will probably decide how to deal with it tomorrow.

The current workaround
Make sure you are on the main page (https://lemmy.world) and not looking at any posts or something like that before hitting the login button.
If you encounter other issues, please make sure to clear the browser cache. The latest upgrade also made changes to the API, which can cause issues with the cached version of the website.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1740

45

A bit off topic, but does anyone else hate how when you click on a post and then go back, the page auto-resets to the top? Wish it would remember how far down you scrolled and return to that point.

42

Huge thanks to the lemmy.world team over the last couple of days to scale and maintain the instance! There's a link for donating on the sidebar for lemmy.world - just a couple bucks a month can help us support this instance!

38

Only being on Lemmy.world for a day. It seems smoother ...yes I am a reddit user trying to find a new home. 😂

33

I cannot connect with Jerboa, it always says user or password incorrect 🙁

Edit: worked after a few minutes

33

Congratulations! I can’t believe how much you get done, Ruud! You are crushing it

33

Well, I hope I'm not the only one but I cannot log in. It's been 4 hours already. Something went wrong. I'm on Firefox mobile.

--> few hours later everything is back to normal

24

Let us know where donations can go, suspect a stacked docker-compose will reach limits very quickly

23

Can I actually post from Jerboa now?! Edit - Great success!!

22

When not overloaded the site works better now than ever. But in general this instancen is kind of unusable now as everything is too slow.

21

So some strange behaviour: When I pressed the upvote arrows in 0.17.4, it'd immediately show this in the UI. Right now, it does not. The response appears quite slow. Is this a function of 0.18.1-rc or a function of the traffic of the Reddit-fugees?

21

I had a strange bug today where I wasn't able to upvote comments. So I cleared out my website data like the website suggested and I started having problems logging in. It would log in but then when I refreshed it wasn't logged in anymore. It stopped after a while but then when I clicked on an old tab when I refreshed I was logged out again. So, the log in issue must be something to do with how iOS Safari handles web cache on tabs.

19

Definitely encountering bugs but I appreciate the work. Growing pains can be good!

18

Am I the only one that just keeps seeing only the same 10 posts on the front page? Almost all about Reddit. Is there just no new content on this app?

18

Very nice. I see there are lots of little UI changes too. Thank you for your time and effort.

18

I'm not sure if this has been said but, when I open lemmy on browser, my account would sometimes be someone elses. I don't know if it's a bug and I saw it happen three times to me so far, and it even happened again a few minutes ago. It's like I i logged into someone elses account, I saw three other usernames so far. A few minutes ago it said my account was Professor -?-?-?- with that account's profile picture shown too. It only does that for half a second before it returns back to my account.

I'm just making sure this is said because I don't want to one day accidentally log into someone else's account by accident.

17

love the transparency and how fast this is!! looks like we will do it lemmy! and reddit can suck a dick

15

Dumb question: how can I set up a small ongoing donation to lemmy.world specifically? I can't seem to find it on the mobile site.

14

Thanks a bunch for your hard work, Ruud and other admin folks! It's so damn GOOD to be able to use Jerboa again!

Also, it's really nice to see the breakdown of your work, helps a lot in understanding what you go through and maybe even of there's anything we can help with. Keep it up!

14

Thanks. Made a one-time 50€ contribution and started monthly payments as well. Hopefully this can help fund a server upgrade.

13

I'm one of the many who have had trouble logging in, and this issue is surely underreported as those affected generally aren't able to report it. It also seems like I'm not able to upvote or downvote. I'll update with any more issues that I come across but I only just now became able to log-in after a long wait and several different browsers.

Edit: it seems like I can successfully upvote/downvote, but the updated vote count and my blue/red arrow only show after refreshing the page. Thanks for all the work you put into this instance btw

Edit 2: All problems seem to have resolved now

12

Real challenging this morning posting and commenting. Circle of death waiting for something to post. Then getting multiple posts if it does go through.

Still early days y’all.

12

I am having some issues logging in to my lemmy.world account atm, just a heads up. I'm sure you folks are slammed right now, thanks for all the work you're doing!

12

I may not be a user on your instance, but either way, thanks for the upgrade. I was noticing a lot of issues with federation from lemmy.world, and it seems like this upgrade more-or-less fixed them.

I'm just running a tiny, single-user instance, but I want you to know that I appreciate the work you're putting in! I run large-scale infra as my day job, so I understand how challenging this sudden influx of users (and federated servers!) is.

12

Awesome work!

I'd like to know more about the exact container topology you have, since I may try something similar on my instance as well.
Is it something like this?

┌───┐       ┌───┐
│WEB│       │WEB│
└─┬─┘       └─┬─┘
┌─┴─┐ ┌───┐ ┌─┴─┐
│BE ├─┤IMG├─┤BE │
└─┬─┘ ├───┤ └─┬─┘
  └───┤DB ├───┘  
      └───┘      

Thank you! :3

11

thank you for letting us know behind-the-scene stuffs.

me myself is a sysadmin and really like story of successfully scaling up servers. very satisfy to hear.

once again, thank you!

11

Amazing work. Thankyou :)

Jerboa 0.0.37 now working fine for me, been hanging out to update.

Really appreciate the transparent communications.

9

Thank you for your effort in running this instance and also for being so transparent about the whole process.

9

Everything was loading so slow 2 hours ago. Hope it will get better from there.

Edit: When I press "Post", it doesn't respond very long time, but reloading page helps.

9

It's faster now, and we finally have buttons for rich text features! Congratulations!

Update: upvotes are a bit broken and weird right now, I need to refresh every time to see that I upvoted. But that's really the only issue I see right now.

8

Profile pictures on user profiles are still stretched, and now the upvote arrows doesn't turn blue until you refresh the page when you press it

Other than that, this is a fantastic design update

8

Will confirm at least for me I'm no longer having any issues.

Thank you for all your hard work!

8

I'm sure there will be bugs for others but it's smooth and bug free for me. Thanks so much for the devs and contributors.

7

Awesome to see the transparency and some tech details of what these updates entail! I’m loving the bug fixes 0.18 brought too

7

Wow - we have a new defniition of 'awesome dudes'.

Thank you.

7

I really appreciate the transparency in this post. There's enough information for me to feel like I kind of know what's going on, and I can go dig into it deeper if I feel like it. This is a breath of fresh air from what I'm used to, thanks so much!

7

was struggling for a while, but it seem to be nice and fast now.. thank you!

7

Updated Jerboa. Thanks for your efforts, transparency and insights.

7

Thank you from England for all the hard work AND for giving such interesting details, especially as it will encourage others to set up their own instances, and help them cross similar hurdles!!

7

So, basically I can't see any content from lemmyworld, I'm commenting right now from another instance. When I logged into my Lemmy world account its just empty, zero content, any solutions?

7

Hey, thanks for your hard work, just want to let you know that login doesn't work for me in incognito mode or on any app.

7

The instance just got so much more faster and stable, it's amazing. Keep up the good work!

7

I am still getting errors half the time I do anything while using jerboa

Website is working great though

Edit: It's suddenly working a lot better now. Hopefully I am not jinxing myself.

6

Having login issues on the browser. Not logging in at all. But on liftoff where I was already logged in, everything seems to be working.

6

we created extra lemmy containers to spread the load. (And extra lemmy-ui containers). And used nginx to load balance between them.

Had no idea nginx did that. There's so much I need to learn

6

thank you for letting us know behind-the-scene stuffs.

me myself is a sysadmin and really like story of successfully scaling up servers. very satisfy to hear.

once again, thank you!

6

Login problem is fixed for me, yay! Back on Jerboa and here on the browser! Thanks for your hard work and for putting up with me, lol.

I'm getting network errors that aren't allowing me to actually view content on Jerboa right now, though, but at this point I'm assuming it's a Jerboa thing and not a problem with the instance.

6

I'm curious; is this instance pysically running on a local private server somewhere or in the cloud in some data center?

6

Really like seeing posts like this that explain what's going on. Thanks for all the hard work!

5

Special thanks to the other guys for helping make this update possible. Site is snappier than ever and the UI looks fantastic.

5

My first comment on here! Thanks for creating this, this looks fantastic and a great Reddit alternative. Keep up the great work.

5

Nice, really liking the update! Some questions about development for the fediverse: Is the code for running Lemmy written by one or person or a smome core team?

Is there any decision making process as to which features will be worked on in the next release or which bugs to prioritize?

In theory what would happen if the original developers started making changes that other people don't agree with? Would we get a fork then where servers have to choose to adopt it or not?

5

Thanks for the update. I especially like the transparency on not only the “upgrade” itself but also the potential issues encountered, together with the solutions. Seems rare nowadays, or I’m just seeing less and less people doing this.

5

This looks like it’s exposed some weaknesses, and it sounds like the team has it under control.

I’m moving right now and can’t dedicate time to development, but once I’m up and running I should be able to start contributing.

Scalability is always a concern with these sites, so there’s plenty to do to improve that

4

Is there a way to follow the update status while this instance is down?

I knew the update was coming, so I expected the downtime, but I could not find any info about when it was expected to be up and running again?

Thanks for the great and ongoing work put into managing this endeavor!

4

Excellent news! I can browse Lemmy on my phone again, many thanks to you @Ruud and everyone else who worked on this!

4

It keeps logging me out, plus when I log in, alarmingly other users' profile names flash in the top right corner for a second.

4

I like it.
The site feels a lot better to me, and seems significantly gentler in terms of browser resource consumption.

4

Have you considered running your Lemmy instance on more than a single machine? If it is possible to run two lemmy containers anyway (ie, lemmy is not a singleton), why not run them on separate machines? With load balancing you could achieve a more stable experience. It might be cheaper to have many mediocre machines rather than a single powerful one too, as well as more sustainable long-term (vertical vs horizontal scaling).

The downside would be that the set-up would be less obvious than with Docker compose and you would probably need to get into k8s/k3s/nomad territory in order to orchestrate a proper fleet.

4

Its been pretty snappy for me all afternoon! No errors to speak of.

Nice work!

4

I can't login from my main browser even if I clear the cache and cookies, if I use other browser it works

Edit: I fixed it just by changing my browser language to English and restarting it, hope this is useful for someone.

Also, thanks to Ruud and team for the hard work, everything seems to work really well and fast.

4

Is there a issue with the api? ( Because the api wrapper lemmy-js-client doesnt work on login. ) I tried it yesterday but not today yet. I will test it when i can :)

4

This is awesome. Was a fun read too. Super cool to see what was going on behind the scenes.

3

Thanks for all the time and work you put towards making this community better! It's really appreciated!

3

0.18 looks a lot better. Far better use of screen real estate on PCs.

Lag is still very prevalent though. Page loading, upvote delay. It's frustrating.

Live comments (like on new Reddit) does not seem to be working on 0.18, so I have to manually refresh the page each time. That also resets the comment sort to Hot, causing further annoyance.

3

Thanks for all the time and work you put towards making this community better! It's really appreciated!

3

Yay, i could finally login. Thank you for the great work and thank you for keeping us updated!

3

Amazing work! It seems much more performant now, everything seems to be loading faster.

3

Thanks for getting the update out!

Definitely weird that it was 1500 instead of some power of 2*100!

Also, when we finally get a 128 thread machine just think of the meme potential!

3

Would you mind sharing your docker-compose.yml file (sanitized, of course)? I am trying to spin up an instance on Google Cloud.

3

It seems that I can't log out in my browser. The page simply reloads after clicking the button.

3

we created extra lemmy containers to spread the load. (And extra lemmy-ui containers).

Is Rust HTTP server running into thread limits? database connection pooling? All kinds of internal questions bout that solution.

3

Running so many Lemmy instances against the same database doesn't cause race conditions? I wonder why that "just worked" so easily, usually load balancing DB-backed apps is a whole beast on its own.

3

Working well here and can use Jerboa again. Although wefwef is really growing on me!

Edit: couldn't post from Jerboa, got network error. But wefwef worked.

3

It seems there is still some performance issues.

Maybe consider a webcache like varnish to take some of the load off?

3

thank you for upgrading! I much prefer the new URL structure of this version

2

YAY! Looks like federation from lemmy.world is working a heck of a lot better now with my instance!

2

Still seeing a lot of 504s, and this is at a time where the site shouldn't be super busy

2

How beautiful and cute the new lemmy world looks. thanks boss.

Que bonito y lindo se ve el nuevo lemmy world. gracias jefe.

2

Does browsing with Incognito/Private mode opens up new bugs, or does the refreshing thing kept the same principle? I should be stayed as logged on, but for some reason - after this update - whenever I open a new private tab from the tab I'm logged on I am indicated as not logged in.

2

I was having trouble earlier but now able to log in just fine on browser. Voting on posts doesn't seem to be working for me on desktop or apps. In apps I keep seeing error notices about votes not going through and desktop browser (Firefox) doesn't work but there's no notification there. Anyone else? Maybe everything needs a little time to sync up.

2

Love the update, all back up and running again :) I joined this morning after discovering this awesome Apollo replacement and was so disappointed that it was down already! Understand that the sudden surge must be huge, looking forward to seeing the data of amount of users gained by Lemmy!

Honestly praying this is the solution we all want and need!

2

Tried to login but nothing happen except a "?" was added into the link. Tried delete data, cookie, etc but the probelm still persist. Comment from other instance

2

I cannot see my subscriptions, not sure if its me or what. On Jerboa 0.34

2

Is the sort algorithm still messed up? In other instances it shows more recent posts in the hot section.

2

You know, this is a nice post because now I understand what was happening to me as a user. Thanks for confirming that I am not insane! Well, maybe I'm insane, but what I was trying to do and couldn't was real, not something I was doing wrong. Also, thanks for updating the stuff that makes it work.

2

Thanks for the hard work!, I had an issue the first minutes where every time I logged in I got logged in with a different stranger account, now it doesn't happen but I can't login haha.

2

Browser still not working for me. The interface loads but there's no content. Also can't login on browser, after entering user and password and clicking login nothing happens.

2

Looks like everything is working well so far. Browsing from Wefwef and Liftoff.

Thank you!

2

Showing us the true value of horizontal instead of vertical scaling! Kubernetes when?

2

Will confirm at least for me I'm no longer having any issues.

Thank you for all your hard work!

2

thank u for letting us know what happening behind the scene. Me myself is a sysadmin and really love to read story about scaling up servers and it actually works! Once again. Thank you.

2

On a somewhat related note, how are you coping with the scaling from the Reddit migration?

2

Thanks for your time and effort! After the kids have gone to bed, grab yourself a beer and put your feet up!

2

Thanks for your time and effort! After the kids have gone to bed, grab yourself a beer and put your feet up!

2

Thank you for al the work. Do you have a need or plans for community help at all? Outside of content moderation? Not quite sure how I could help but I do software for a living.

1

Just came to congratulate you for all the hard work. Thank you for making this possible!

1

Question @[email protected] why update to the release candidate? Just want to help testing? Or was there some readdition (ie: captcha) that had you quick on the trigger?

1

Thank you for the work and all the transparency Ruud, glad to have you as our Admin.

1

Thank you! Your hard work is truly appreciated.

This whole upgrade process reminded me to check the patreon donation stuff for y'all.

1

Nice they finally updated after forever lol j/k wefwef and some other third-party said are getting rate limited. Wefwef is unusable

1

Thanks very much for your time and effort Ruud, it's much appreciated! Now, after you've put the kids to bed, grab yourself a beer and put your feet up!

1

Nice, hopefully this'll fix the auto refreshing new posts on PC! Thanks man ^^

1

Clearing the cache seems to have fixed the login bug.

There is another big going on where I'm seemingly logged out all the time though.

1

Congrats on figuring it out! I'm just wading into docker in a professional capacity so I admit some of it feels like magic to my traditional developer brain but glad it worked out.

1

Thanks for being both informative and open about this issue. Hope it works out.

1

Could finally login back to my lemmy.world account on Jerboa. Thanks for all the work, Ruud!

1

Hopefully the performance issue will be resolved soon, I can imagine lots of new refugees will be migrating to this instance.

1

What I had noticed previously, is that the lemmy container could reach around 1500% CPU usage, above that the site got slow. Which is weird, because the server has 64 threads, so 6400% should be the max. So we tried what @[email protected] had suggested before: we created extra lemmy containers to spread the load. (And extra lemmy-ui containers). And used nginx to load balance between them.

Et voilà. That seems to work.

They're on virtual tin and didn’t configure properly. There are limits in the flat files you need to change by hand to get it to scale properly, it’s tricky.

1

Thanks for being both informative and open about this issue. Hope it works out.

Edit: The first two versions of this post didn't seem to send: spinning post button. Maybe it's not fixed or it's struggling?

1

Works with Jerboa again (yay).

Kinda makes sense that multiple containers might scale better. The actual processes within the container may have some limitations in terms of how well they thread etc.

1

Thank you so much for doing this! The having an instance this big really made the difference for leaving reddit. I really missed jerboa and am glad to have it back as a client.

1

Bug I’m running into -

When my mobile browser (Firefox, iOS) language is set to something other than English, not content loads and I am unable to log in.

1