I’m just trying to gauge if the performance gain will be worth the additional effort and have some questions. Was directed here from asklemmy.
I’ve read that back end communication is relatively cheap compared to end user content presentation in Lemmy. So, that leads me to believe that if I host my own instance, even without any communities, it would present content from other instances to me faster and more reliably. Are these assumptions correct?
Does an instance do any content caching for other instances? Ie, if I browse asklemmy@lemmy.ml and someone else does the same, will my instance need to make new requests to lemmy.ml?
Are images caches from other instances?
Obviously if my instance goes down, there’s no service. Is there some sort of high availability or clustering supported?
Are updates relatively straightforward on Docker? I assume just pull the new image and you’re good to go, or are there usually database migrations to complete outside of that?
Thanks for reading!
Thank you for this write-up, extremely helpful. I’d probably have like 5 people on the instance, but network health is a very real concern. Probably want 100 users minimum or something per instance to be efficient.
I dunno where the break even point is. 5 active users who read 90% of the posts in their subscribed feed could easily be a win. But on the flip side, the network may just struggle to deliver federation messages beyond a certain instance count irrespective of how many users are on each instance. We’re kind of all learning as we go.
If you want to stand up an instance, go for it. I’m just highlighting possible tradeoffs, but they’re changing quickly and I don’t think anyone knows what the right course is beyond “a medium number of medium sized instances is probably optimal”.
That makes sense. I there a place to monitor the general health of the entire network, or would it end up being greater replication time, and misses?
Not really. I just watch a lot of support communities, admin communities, and big instance announcement channels to keep up with the technical vibe across the lemmyverse… but even spending all that time reading posts/comments I have no idea what is an individual admin not knowing how to tune their instance and what is fundamental limits that matter.
You kind of just have to make a call with incomplete info and live with it. If you want to run an instance, do it… there’s no clear consensus that we’re at the network size limit. Just be aware that the performance tradeoffs are complicated and I wouldn’t recommend telling everyone that the “solution” is single-user instances, because that way lies a different set of performance problems that are at least equally serious.