Test instance

Last few days we have been setting up a test instance of Friendica where we can test changes. After that was setup, we started by testing the first change: moving the media (images etc) from the database to S3.

Storage from database to S3

In the default Friendica install, media (and other files) are stored in the database. In our database, this has already grown to be a table of 100 GB containing almost 5 million items.
Luckily, there's a plugin with which you can move the media storage to S3. We have enabled that in the test instance, and moved our beautiful test images from database to S3. This worked well.

Now we have enabled the same on friendica.world, so any new image is uploaded to the S3 bucket. Moving the existing files from database to S3 is a process thats still running (at 10000 items per hour)

Performance issues

Now the next thing we need to look into, is the continuing performance issues. From time to time, the site gets unresponsive, especially the 'network' page.

Scaling out

The first thing we're going to do, which we had already prepared, is:
- Add a loadbalancer
- Move the application containers to separate VMs
This way, the large server we currently use, will only be used by the database. The application can be scaled to multiple VMs if needed.

After that we can focus on tuning the database and helping the Friendica developers finding the queries that don't perform well.

Donations

Adding hardware / VMs means more costs for running friendica.world. If you would like to donate and help us cover the running costs, you can do so here: ko-fi.com/fhfworld

We try to keep track of costs and donations on this blog: blog.mastodon.world (but due to lack of time it might take a while between updates...)

Thank you for your patience!