Repost From Nov 20 for #NewUsers

Wait! What's wrong with my bleeping # searches?

Maybe today you tried a search and there was something curious about the results. On this server almost every post returned was 5hr old, then it grew to 10hr, and now it is 11hr. What’s wrong?

Well, first thing is, Mastodon is not broken, but your instance is struggling.

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#twittermigration #mastodontips #mastotips #server #queues #mastoadmin

If this is happening to you, go ahead and click on the world icon on the right. This shows you your Federated feed. Note that this is also running behind. In our case now 12hr behind. This is because there is too much work for the server to do and something has to give.

So hang on here… Mastodon has things called queues which are... queues for handling jobs the server needs to do.
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#twittermigration #mastodontips #mastotips #server #queues #mastodonmigration

Every job has to line up at the back of the queue and the server services the jobs one after another. When things are working right the server has plenty of time to handle each job and the queues are very short. Everyone is happy.

But when there is too much work to do and not enough server power, the queues can back up. That is what is happening to your Federated timeline.
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#twittermigration #mastodontips #mastotips #server #queues #mastodonmigration

Still there?… Mastodon uses different queues for tasks of varying importance. The most important queues get taken care of first. It’s like boarding group 1. Well, back in boarding group 4 and 5 are the jobs that fetch information from the other servers and mange # searches.

Wait what?... fetching information from other servers? OK…
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#twittermigration #mastodontips #mastotips #server #queues #mastodonmigration #mastoadmin

The way Mastodon works is that everyone’s data is stored on their own instance server. When you publish a post it is stored on your server, but it is also stored on the server of EVERYONE WHO FOLLOWS YOU. That is, it is sent (Federated) to the followers server and stored there too.
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#twittermigration #mastodontips #mastotips #server #queues #mastodonmigration

@mastodonmigration That seems a bit complicated. Why not make all servers a part of one large cloud instance so you aren't making thousands of unnecessary copies (potentially). Also, if this space takes off and you have accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers that becomes a potential bottleneck. Or am I mistaken in my assessment.

@Zanni There are plusses and minuses to any architecture. Twitter is one large cloud, and the problem there is that one catastrophic event (like being purchased by a capricious billionaire) can wipe out the data of the entire planet. The Fediverse distributed architecture may seem complicated, but it is pretty similar to other distributed systems like email and designed for resilience and scalability.

#mastodonmigration #twittermigration #mastodontips

@mastodonmigration I get that. I'm sure the platform will evolve as well as more and more people adopt it.