Tim BrayIf you are, or have ever been, a sysadmin, grab a bag of popcorn and cruise through this one. Thrills and chills! https://thomasp.vivaldi.net/2023/07/28/what-happened-to-vivaldi-social/
Aaron Ogle@timbray that was a great write up. Gotta love replication delays and race conditions 🙈
Alan Brand 
@timbray
Wow, that took me back to my sysadmin days ... I'm appreciating retirement a little more after reading that adventure.
Wow, that took me back to my sysadmin days ... I'm appreciating retirement a little more after reading that adventure.
jefg@timbray Ouch, that made me wince. I dealt with a similarly convoluted issue a couple weeks ago. Shout out to all the devs and sys admins who keep this platform running!
Mike Edey@timbray oh my so, umm: a race condition, a mismatched parentheses, call by ref vs val, possible Unicode string .. only missing an off-by-one error for Yahtzee .
This is a very good write up and I wish we got more that are this candid.
passthejoe@timbray I'm glad they were able to restore the accounts. I'm a Vivaldi browser user (for my work tasks) but was already active on a good server (ruby.social) when they started with Mastodon and didn't sign up.
As an amateur sysadmin, I've had a LOT of trouble with my own attempts at #Mastodon/#Akkoma/#Pleroma/#GoToSocial server installation, and I can't imagine running it at such a high level.
As an amateur sysadmin, I've had a LOT of trouble with my own attempts at #Mastodon/#Akkoma/#Pleroma/#GoToSocial server installation, and I can't imagine running it at such a high level.
Den Spier 
@timbray Neatly described.
My only beef is the passage “all local accounts in a Mastodon instance have a null value in their URI field, so they all matched”. But null ≠ null, AccountMergingWorker isn’t matching correctly.
Vitex
xChaos 🌍 🐘 🚴 🏕️ 🏞️
Javier@timbray that reminded me of this article about the exact same problem that caused the issue: https://brandur.org/job-drain
Joe Cooper 🇺🇦 🍉@timbray this is why I have resisted starting my own server. That's quite a harrowing experience, taking days to fully resolve even with a quite technical team with upstream dev support, all putting in heroic hours. I aint got that kind of time.
Peter 
🧷@timbray As much as I like the writeup, it again illustrates one issue I keep having with Devs as a Sysadmin: they rarely plan for scaling.
Running read queries against read-only replication targets that might have a delay is one of the best ways to increase performance, response times, and uptime, so it should be supported in some way.
ghostdancer@timbray Better write up , more interesting and more suspense than half of the movies you can watch.