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Liam @ GamingOnLinux ๐Ÿง๐ŸŽฎ

The results are in, after seeing about 800 boosts on the post to see how the Mastodon embed actually affects our server load. Here's what happened....basically nothing for us.

Image shows our server load slightly ramp up after the post on Mastodon that relied on the embed, but against other normal traffic is all looks pretty usual.
18 comments
Christopher Snowhill

@gamingonlinux I think itsfoss doesn't have proper caching set up for their CDN and just gets bombarded with every request for the site, possibly every subsequent request by every user as well.

Liam @ GamingOnLinux ๐Ÿง๐ŸŽฎ

@chris as a dynamic site too, we also don't exactly use a plain html cache either, but our website is also around 1mb without browser cache on an article, there's is like 11mb!

Christopher Snowhill

@gamingonlinux Maybe your site's just way better on server load than whatever hot mess they're apparently using.

Christopher Snowhill

@gamingonlinux Hmm, they're using Ghost, and whatever Rinne is.

Liam @ GamingOnLinux ๐Ÿง๐ŸŽฎ

@chris they're using cheapo digital ocean vps, it's not surprising, they're not designed to handle load

Daniele Pantaleo ๐Ÿฆฅ:verified:

@gamingonlinux @chris jwz made a similar article as well, wonder what happened in their case

Wheatly

@gamingonlinux it's kinda funny that instead of hiring someone to submit a patch for their issue, #itsfoss decided to publish the article about their technical problems

The article reads superficial, like vague request for commercial proposal but for free lol

> #Mastodon instance admins, please fix our computer, or else we'll stop reposting to your social network

Folks, this is not journalism...

Liam @ GamingOnLinux ๐Ÿง๐ŸŽฎ

@graphito "just hire someone" is not really a valid thing here though for smaller sites, the article framing was poor given how heavy their site is but the issue behind it does exist

Baggypants

@gamingonlinux @graphito It is an issue, especially for self-hosters. I enjoy watching all the victim blaming and denigration that goes along with it, because people pointing out issues with an open source protocol _must_ mean they want to wall garden the entire internet.

Wheatly

@gamingonlinux
I admit, similar approach might be justified for small websites (1-2 people) who cannot have budget to deal with technical problems

But surely #itsfoss have the budget to deal with tech. Instead they turned to public activism to save a bit of it.

Why not publish the tech description on freelancer sites and have the patch submitted by monday for $300?

Turns out, to rile up the audience and instance admins is simply cheaper ๐Ÿ˜ณ

cc @Baggypants

@gamingonlinux
I admit, similar approach might be justified for small websites (1-2 people) who cannot have budget to deal with technical problems

But surely #itsfoss have the budget to deal with tech. Instead they turned to public activism to save a bit of it.

Why not publish the tech description on freelancer sites and have the patch submitted by monday for $300?

FinchHaven

@graphito

Can't believe the legs that article got yesterday

Everybody was commenting on it, most clearly without having bothered to read, let alone understand, the article

It said right in the article that their users were seeing an http 504 error intermittently

"504 Gateway Timeout -- This error response is given when the server is acting as a gateway and cannot get a response in time"

And they admitted that Cloudflare was providing CMS

Not that there's any connection

cc @gamingonlinux

Grampa

@gamingonlinux Thereโ€™s a lot missing here. How many CPU cores? Is this normalized load? What was the latency? Were there timeouts? Why are you looking at ~10 minute intervals when the reported problem is with spikes of ~1 minute? Very โ€œworks on my machineโ€ type post

Liam @ GamingOnLinux ๐Ÿง๐ŸŽฎ

@grampajoe You could try being a bit nicer ya know, this kind of reply in future will just get you muted, this is just the charts my host gives me ๐Ÿคท

Grampa

@gamingonlinux Sorry, didnโ€™t mean to be mean. I was concerned that you were using your platform to show that this isnโ€™t a problem without understanding what the problem is.

When a link is posted on an account thatโ€™s federated to a lot of instances, it gets accessed many times all at once to generate link previews. That means you should see very short bursts of traffic, and that can be enough to cause requests to queue up and possibly time out or get rejected. Hope that helps

Liam @ GamingOnLinux ๐Ÿง๐ŸŽฎ

@grampajoe I've never said it isn't a real problem that exists, I just wanted to do a basic test for myself to see and it was fine, nothing more

Grampa

@gamingonlinux I guess Iโ€™m trying to say it might not have been fine, because it might not show up as a high load average. If you have server logs (especially proxy logs e.g. nginx) from the time you posted the link, you might see what Iโ€™m talking about. The concern I have is that people will see this and think itโ€™s evidence there isnโ€™t a problem given the reach your posts are getting.

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