I already get rate-limited like crazy on lemmy and there are only like 60,000 users on my instance. Is each instance really just one server or are there multiple containers running across several hosts? I’m concerned that federation will mean an inconsistent user experience. Some instances many be beefy, others will be under resourced… so the average person might think Lemmy overall is slow or error-prone.
Reddit has millions of users. How the hell is this going to scale? Does anyone have any information about Lemmy’s DB and architecture?
I found this post about Reddit’s DB from 2012. Not sure if Lemmy has a similar approach to ensure speed and reliability as the user base and traffic grows.
https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/reddits-database-has-two-tables/
I don’t see any reasons why you couldn’t run more copies of the backend and frontend, as long as it uses the database properly. It should scale horizontally decently for a while.
At work I have clusters that runs 40-50 application servers all going to one database and handles millions of requests daily, on a pretty inefficient PHP application. Lemmy being in Rust, it can handle a lot of traffic.
Given the frontend is in nodejs, I suspect we’ll need to scale up the frontend first, which should be no problem at all, just many copies of the frontend to fewer copies of the backend to fewer copies of the database. Maybe slap Cloudflare in front at some point.
It will probably get costly to run before it becomes hard technically to scale up.
Additionally, federation messages probably can be easily separated to different server, and is being made much more efficient right now.