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Comment by mvdtnz | Hacker News Reader

There is no good reason for any ordinary web application to hit scaling limits at 1,500 users. The developer vaguely waves his hands at memory issues but it's hard to imagine what kind of reasonably-designed system could possibly be putting memory pressure at that scale.

There's no way any modern language will be your bottleneck at that scale.

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I think it's perfectly ordinary for a new web application to hit scaling issues at that number. Accidental O(n^2) stuff, missing database indexes, poor use of memory, excessive I/O are easy mistakes to make during initial implementation and probably will get fixed.

That's what I mean by "no good reason". This is the scale where you start to notice the stupid stuff you let through - N+1's, excessive unnecessary string allocations in inner loops, debug logging etc.

What I mean is, there's nothing fundamental about their tech choices that could explain such low scaling limits. It'll be either poor design/architecture, poor coding standards or both.

I don't think the Lemmy developers were expecting #RedditBlackout to dump 150,000 users onto their federation in a week.

They were probably trucking along with various feature requests when suddenly performance became an issue this past week.

Where are you finding that number, 150,000? The instance in question has one one hundredth that figure and the Lemmy devs claim 27,000 accounts grand total.

Lemmy.world is 31k users alone. Beehaw.org is 12.k users (and each of those users at Beehaw.org were manually curated)

Maybe 150,000 is wrong, I saw it posted somewhere but I'm not sure what the methodology is. But between Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org we're already at 43k+ users.

27k is a gross underestimate.

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EDIT:

https://kbin.social/nodeinfo/2.0

https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

Lemmy-fediverse is claiming 159,000+ users today.

EDIT2: kbin link must have been glitched. kbin.social's specific nodeinfo is "only" claiming 35k users, which is still substantial.

I agree with your point that whatever the number, they weren’t expecting that surge right now. The actual number is barely relevant.

> Lemmy devs

Programming.dev is _NOT_ the lemmy devs. This is a discussion from https://programmers.dev, a totally separate group of people.

This is just an administrator who is sharing their Lemmy experiences while talking about Rust and such.

Lemmy.ml, the original developer's instance, is well known to be a small server.

Lemmy.world is well into 31,500+ users on a single server and still growing strong. But growing pains have begun to creep in in any case. The server's software clearly needs a few optimization passes.

What does a small server mean here? Is there an architecture diagram for a Lemmy instance somewhere? What parts can't be replicated? Is it a small database server?

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