Hi all, welcome to Lemmy 0.19.8!

We had about 10 mins of downtime starting from 1:17 this afternoon as the database migrations ran. Apollogies if this interrupted your lunchtime scrolling, this was needed because the Controversial scores needed to be re-calculated as detailed below.

We have skipped a few versions, we were on 0.19.5, and so we have .6, .7, and .8 updates. A brief summary follows, with links to the Lemmy announcements.

Lemmy 0.19.6 changes:

  • This version introduces parallel sending, which should solve our issues with Lemmy.world and remove the need for the extra VPS in Finland. Unfortunately Lemmy.world needs to update for this to work, so it will be a while longer.
  • Changed sameSite cookie from Strict to Lax - I think this should help the issue where you are logged out from the browser a lot (especially in Firefox)
  • There’s a change in how “Controversial” is calculated, to use exponents instead of multiplication, to match how Reddit does it. Unfortunately the Lemmy documentation page seems not to list Controversial ranking among the other explanations, but there is some discussion here.
  • Removed the “Trending” box from the home page. I kinda liked how it worked for us to find our local communities but oh well.
  • This was a reasonably big release but mostly backend stuff - see link above for more info.

Lemmy 0.19.7 and Lemmy 0.19.8 are small bugfix releases, some of which fix issues introduced by 0.19.6 so we didn’t see them. I don’t see anything of interest to an average user but if you’re interested take a look at the announcement posts linked.

Let me know if you see any issues, or have any questions.

  • Dave@lemmy.nzOPM
    8·
    12 days ago

    This update seems to have significant improvements for CPU usage! We’ve been running at 80-90% CPU on quite a beefy server, and now it’s dropped significantly:

    screen shot of graph showing 80-90% CPU usage, then suddenly falling to around 30% usage - graph is over the last hour

    • timbuck2themoonEnglish
      2·
      10 days ago

      This is great news. Will be cheaper for existing operators and encourage more people to stand up servers.

      Nice proxmox BTW:)

      • Dave@lemmy.nzOPM
        2·
        10 days ago

        This 30% ish level is around where we were before enabling image proxying a few months back (to help avoid the broken image issue when other servers couldn’t handle the load). Something in the image proxying (I think the thumbnail generation) had a bug which is now fixed.

        I think people with low powered servers probably don’t cache images so it might not actually help.

    • Dave@lemmy.nzOPM
      3·
      10 days ago

      It’s dedicated hardware that fediservices.nz run, and they lend us a container to run lemmy.nz. It also runs a bunch of federated services that fediservices.nz manage themselves (mastodon.nz, pixelfed.nz, etc). We are allocated 8 CPUs and 16GB RAM out of the pool of resources. and are using about 600GB of local storage between the main lemmy drive and the local backup drive (approx evenly split).

      @[email protected] might be able to give some more specific info about the hardware.

      • idanoo@lemmy.nzEnglish
        3·
        9 days ago

        We have a couple of older gen HP DL360P G8’s sitting in a DC in Auckland, I’m not near a computer to grab the exact specs but it’s all running on proxmox and heaps of headroom :)