Update The upgrade was done, DB migrations took around 5 minutes. We’ll keep an eye out for (new) issues but for now it seems to be OK.

Original message We will upgrade lemmy.world to 0.18.3 today at 20:00 UTC+2 (Check what this isn in your timezone). Expect the site to be down for a few minutes. ““Edit”” I was warned it could be more than a few minutes. The database update might even take 30 minutes or longer.

Release notes for 0.18.3 can be found here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/RELEASES.md

(This is unrelated to the downtimes we experienced lately, those are caused by attacks that we’re still looking into mitigating. Sorry for those)

  • AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    This version brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%.

    Is it me or is the 80% figure just insane? Are there any benchmarks to see how fast this has become versus say Lemmy 0.18.2 on a very large instance?

    • miket@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      Funnily enough, this is the feature that can speed up the performance by doing less calls:

      The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.

    • miket@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      Is it me or is the 80% figure just insane?

      Not really, you’d be surprised how often systems are bloated all because of a single option, character, etc. Most developers don’t start optimizing until much later in the software’s lifecycle. Often enough, it is easily overlooked. That’s why code reviews are needed often with fresh pair of eyes.

      Just to set the expectations, reducing database size or CPU usage does not necessarily mean it is faster but it does mean there’s more free capacity on the servers with handle more users at the same speed. More importantly; they may reduce costs on the smaller indie instances that doesn’t need to buy larger server instances.

      Hopefully, we’ll continue to see more of these optimizations.