The instance has been updated to version 0.19.4!
You can see the official release post and notes here: https://lemmy.ml/post/16585359?scrollToComments=true
Since this update required some manual intervention anyway to update the database version, I took the opportunity to perform some overdue server maintenance and upgrades.
I have migrated the server to a more powerful configuration, and changed the way image files are being stored and served (object storage as opposed to filesystem storage).
I am also aware of some federation issues that have affected this and other instances. I am not sure whether this upgrade will deal with these problems automatically. I will be looking into it and hopefully will implement some solution soon.
Sorry for the downtime experienced in the past few days, but hopefully with the more powerful server the experience will be smoother and will remain so for a while.
For other admins and users interested, this is a bit of information about the server
The previous configuration:
Hosting provider: serverspace.io
8 GB RAM
4 Core CPU
50 Mbps network
400 GB SSD
Cost: $55 / month
The 400 GB SSD was being used to store both the server’s database and the image files, and this component in isolation had a monthly cost of $36. I have migrated the images to an object storage provider ($6/month for 500 GB), and used the resources previously used for disk space to increase the other parameters. The new configuration is a lot better and less expensive.
New configuration:
Hosting provider: serverspace.io
Object storage provider: contabo.com
16 GB RAM
6 core CPU
50 Mbps network
100 GB SSD
500 GB Object storage
Cost: $47/month
Thanks a lot to the lemmy and pict-rs devs for the hard work they put into developing the infrastructure!
The instance is catching up at a rate of ~15 activities/s, and we are 2.5M activities behind. So it should take about 2 days to catch up.
I have tried fiddling with some parameters to see if this could be improved, but I did not find the right knob to tune. Best is probably to just let it run 😄
The trend seems to go down at a nice pace, there’s something quite satisfying to see it go down like that ha ha
Nice!
Does this have anything to do with the front page giving an error message? I get a lemmy server error, however I was able to log out and log back in again, and I can get to the communities page which got me back to this discussion, but even forcing a browser refresh of the front page continues to give an error message for me. FYI, ctrl-shift-R also fails, I’m not sure what else to try.