this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
14 points (100.0% liked)

Lemmy

12884 readers
20 users here now

Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
14
Hypothetically, if all lemmy users were on instances of a very small number (< 20), would this be better or worse for scaling? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
11 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

And I guess this question is two parts: 1. Regarding the current lemmy implementation, and 2. The activityPub protocol in general

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

It's a great question! To know this, we'd need to look into not just what the ActivityPub protocol says, but also exactly how the code base implements it, and how the server actually performs on the computers it's deployed on.

We might look specifically at:

  1. How many requests (and of what types) does a typical end user send to their local instance?
  2. How many requests (etc.) does an instance send to its peer instances?
  3. How is (2) controlled by the number of subscriptions, posts, or other variables?
  4. How does instance performance respond to different kinds of request load?
  5. How have instance operators tuned the Lemmy server or its backends to manage different loads?

Because ActivityPub is built on HTTP, different types of request are expressed as different URL paths and HTTP methods. This should make it straightforward to characterize the servers' behavior under different kinds of load (e.g. lots of local posts; lots of remote posts; lots of new user accounts; etc.)

Doing this "for serious" as an engineering project would require some amount of testing infrastructure, e.g. the ability to replay various kinds of traffic against a Lemmy server while monitoring its performance.