Picard's Little Teacup
John ConwayEvery #Mastodon admin right now.
There may be some slowdown at Sauropods.win folks, I'm going for another upgrade, but the hosting provider is struggling to keep up with this colossal deluge.
Update, the upgrade has gone though, we should be good... for at least a day or so! Lordy!
Rob Soto@john anything us little mastodons can do for the good of the herd?
@RaptorRobb Just keep on tooting! I've got this.
In a month or so I'm going to take stock, and if it's big enough see about how to make this place more community run and funded.
Definitely will be voluntary, whatever the funding mechanism.
Will Goring
Gato_Loco π» Ο β
Thibaultmol π@john Q: why?
I get their support is struggling, I'm sure, but in terms of server capacity... isn't it just.. spinning up a bigger VPS?
I get their support is struggling, I'm sure, but in terms of server capacity... isn't it just.. spinning up a bigger VPS?
@thibaultmol I'm on managed hosting at a small company. Mastodon is actually a finicky beast, and requires some tuning to actual loads as far as I understand it.
Iasen Kostov π§π¬πͺπΊπΊπ¦@john @thibaultmol Mastodon is using one of the slowest languages for web - Ruby (5-10+ times slower than PHP for example). I think that doesn't help the whole thing.
Ada Hashtag@thibaultmol @john as someone who has worked at a small hosting company with a VPS offering..
Where do you think the VPS lives? π€
dosch 
@john maybe pod admins should just close for new members and urge people to setup their own instances...
You're bound to get into moderation issues if your pods grow to big...
Sim
LeoBurr@john @BlurTheFur Not Burrs. :)
@byAndreasπ€πβ¨@john @simonstalenhag
We can help them out with those servers in a few different ways :)
https://www.patreon.com/mastodonart
Steve Washington@byandreas @john @simonstalenhag I had no qualms about making a contribution to Mastodon on Patreon. I never felt that way about Twitter.
Fabio Romeo
bacigalupe@john Any advice about how not to tax the servers?
@bacigalupe For my part, on my smol server, people can use it how they want; if it slows down or falls over, oh well. I don't want to dampen anyones enthusiasm.
I don't know the specific bottlenecks on the giant instances.
Twitter had the fail whale every five minutes at the beginning, didn't stop it growing!
Fabio Manganiello@john so far I'm *kind of* managing to keep the situation under control on my instance with a more aggressive `tootctl <media|preview_cards> remove` policy - running the cronjob more often, and removing anything older than 3 days.
But even with this policy I've got a 10 GB database dump, and the live-web Docker image is around 7 GB - meaning mostly filled with media stuff posted/viewed just in the last 3 days (!!)
And I've also been careful in associating only to relay servers that don't push a lot of traffic from a lot of instances, otherwise the situation would be more dramatic.
I think it's time that admins start to be a bit less shy about asking users to donate to keep the lights on. #ElonMusk was planning to turn #Twitter profitable, but so far the only one who is likely to see a lot more profit is probably #Linode, thanks to all the nodes being upgraded in these days.
@blacklight I'm glad I went with managed hosting, this would be so stressful if I was in your situation!
RuthS@blacklight @john could you limit media file size ? Would that reduce storage and congestion ?
Johan (γ¨γγ³) Silkens@john downloadmoreserver.com
Idriss Neumann 
@john I feel you π€£
SirCaffeine@john Spot on! π
Michael Brooks 
@john I'm just sitting in my own little corner, watching everyone else struggle. π
Morsus Apri R.I.P. Natenomπ―οΈπ€@john
One more line will fix it?
One more line will fix it?
Saustrup@john you said it man π³
EngineerMom
Space Hobo@john Please scale mastodon *out* rather than *up*! We need more servers, not one giant Birdsite-replacement!
@spacehobo Small servers (like mine) are feeling this too! If you're scaled to 5 or 6 active users, and have an influx of a a couple of hundred, it makes a big difference!
@john Absolutely! But the answer is more servers, not more users per server!
@spacehobo I agree in general terms, but I think we should be realistic about how many people are going to set up domains and run servers. Heck, an awful lot of people fall at the hurdle of "choose a server".
Kushal Das 
πΈπͺ@john not the closed ones :)
Ariadne Conill π°
@john not me, i have that problem solved
Tim Myers@john Mine is 4GB Ram, 2 Cores, 80GB storage. Letβs see how it holds up. π
masyfil
Citizen Sly@john Absolutely! Especially now that @gretathunberg has joined us. I read that she has 5 million followers on that bird site. If they all migrate over, we're gonna need LOTS of bigger servers.
Steve Green@CitizenSly @john @gretathunberg like it or not Mastodon will change. No longer small groups, altho they continue quietly in the background. But mass numbers coming over will mean some bigger servers, far more users/toots.
Matt WilcoxYou'd also hope that every developer on the stack is thinking:
"Oh crap, NOW it's time to optimise this stack..."
Sam Tang 
Rufous@john Sorry all π¬
Enrique Barcelli@john you bet!
Hoping many non-admins choose to run their own servers though.
Hoping many non-admins choose to run their own servers though.
Rainwolf /α΅α΄₯α΅\@john definitely noticed that in the Mastodon instance I am in as they swapped over to require a invite link that users can generate to not overwhelm the server
Thom
______nox_@john Wait, so more and more users are coming in? Or are they spreading out through many instances?
Stargeezer Smith@john
Or more distributed servers?
Or more distributed servers?
@stargazersmith Well I don't wanna run more than one!
Ricardo βοΈ@john Stephen fry just deleted is bluebird account. How long before he joins us here?
@RicardoHalez Shame he didn't say anything about moving here. He's quite techy isn't he? I would have thought Mastodon was his sort of thing.
@john my thoughts too. James Gunn is on here now.
Helen
sfunk1x@john What are you using for an environment, and how many users? eg 4vcpu/4gb etc