this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
162 points (94.5% liked)

Programming

17366 readers
484 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
Ategon@programming.dev
MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz
162
Does Lemmy really benefit from Rust? Is code execution speed the bottleneck? (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Buttons@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev
150 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

My first experience with Lemmy was thinking that the UI was beautiful, and lemmy.ml (the first instance I looked at) was asking people not to join because they already had 1500 users and were struggling to scale.

1500 users just doesn't seem like much, it seems like the type of load you could handle with a Raspberry Pi in a dusty corner.

Are the Lemmy servers struggling to scale because of the federation process / protocols?

Maybe I underestimate how much compute goes into hosting user generated content? Users generate very little text, but uploading pictures takes more space. Users are generating millions of bytes of content and it's overloading computers that can handle billions of bytes with ease, what happened? Am I missing something here?

Or maybe the code is just inefficient?

Which brings me to the title's question: Does Lemmy benefit from using Rust? None of the problems I can imagine are related to code execution speed.

If the federation process and protocols are inefficient, then everything is being built on sand. Popular protocols are hard to change. How often does the HTTP protocol change? Never. The language used for the code doesn't matter in this case.

If the code is just inefficient, well, inefficient Rust is probably slower than efficient Python or JavaScript. Could the complexity of Rust have pushed the devs towards a simpler but less efficient solution that ends up being slower than garbage collected languages? I'm sure this has happened before, but I don't know anything about the Lemmy code.

Or, again, maybe I'm just underestimating the amount of compute required to support 1500 users sharing a little bit of text and a few images?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] kaba0@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wait — it uses websockets for each and every user??! That’s just completely insane and of course it will fail to scale! There is zero reason for that, have specific live threads with websockets where it makes sense (though that is only mostly a one-way communication so even there it is an overkill), but for mostly static content it is just insanely inefficient.. surely I’m more than fine with that upvote appearing a minute later and not in “real time”!

[–] sznio@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

As I said - I'm pulling this out of my ass. Browser debugging tools don't support websockets well, but looking at the network log, it seems to start a websocket for every tab.