Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
Nolan Lawson

"Is the fediverse about to get Fryed? (Or, 'Why every toot is also a potential denial of service attack')" by @aral ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fedive

Great summary of the problem, although I don't think there is anything malicious behind these performance issues. My hunch (read: wild-ass guess) is that performance has just not been a huge concern for Mastodon until now, and so now we're feeling the effects. Also: it's hard to measure/predict perf in a federated network.

2 comments
Nolan Lawson

The perf issues are bad enough that Wired is writing about it: wired.com/story/twitter-users-

And Mastodon admins are having to get creative: blog.freeradical.zone/post/sur

Here on toot.cafe, Sidekiq queues have been backed up for days, and I will probably not see your response to this toot until tomorrow. 😅 And that's despite the fact that 1) I bumped the EC2 instance side from t3.medium to t3.xlarge, 2) I added a 2nd Sidekiq process, and 3) registrations have been closed for years. (Just returning users!)

The perf issues are bad enough that Wired is writing about it: wired.com/story/twitter-users-

And Mastodon admins are having to get creative: blog.freeradical.zone/post/sur

Here on toot.cafe, Sidekiq queues have been backed up for days, and I will probably not see your response to this toot until tomorrow. 😅 And that's despite the fact that 1) I bumped the EC2 instance side from t3.medium to t3.xlarge, 2) I added a...

Nolan Lawson

I would be really curious to read an in-depth perf analysis from someone who knows what they're talking about (read: not me) explaining the root cause of the "Mastodon meltdown." E.g. is it:

1) A flaw in how Mastodon prioritizes Sidekiq queues?
2) As instance X gets slow, it slows down instance Y when instance Y tries to contact it? (I.e. is it systemic?)
3) Would exponential backoff help? More relay servers? Admins just learning how to tune Sidekiq properly? Rewriting Mastodon in Rust? 🙃

Go Up