How much difference does a CDN make to a fediverse instance? - PieFed
How much difference does a CDN make to a fediverse instance? - PieFed
For a very small instance with only a couple of concurrent users a CDN might not make much difference. But if you take a look at your web server logs you’ll quickly notice that every post / like / vote triggers a storm of requests from other instances to yours, looking up lots of different […]
cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/5391072
February 20, 2024 piefedadmin writes:
For a very small instance with only a couple of concurrent users a CDN might not make much difference. But if you take a look at your web server logs you’ll quickly notice that every post / like / vote triggers a storm of requests from other instances to yours, looking up lots of different things. It’s easy to imagine how quickly this would overwhelm an instance once it gets even a little busy.
One of the first web performance tools people reach for is to use a CDN, like Cloudflare. But how much difference will it make? In this video I show you my web server logs before and after and compare them.
Read How much difference does a CDN make to a fediverse instance?
We need an encyclopedia of posts/content like this that is the masterbook of Fediverse ops and scaling "how-to."
Go on then sailor. Be the change you want to see!
This should be paragraph one
Thank you for sharing, interesting topic!
On a side-note, I just had a look at Piefed, I like their topics list: https://piefed.social/topics
Flippin' eck. Seeing a familiar Lemmy post on there, clicking it and seeing the whole thing render instantly was a bit of a shock after getting used to Lemmy's more pedestrian loading of stuff.
Using a CDN does not come without downsides, though. Cloudflare itself is becoming another "too big to fail" entity of a system that is not supposed to depend on the resilience/capacity/budget of any single actor.
Personally, I'd rather see a tiered architecture for data, where servers are only responsible for guaranteeing the data from actors on their own servers, but everything else stored in a distributed, append-only stream of data. This would make a lot cheaper to run individual instances and would allow clients to obtain the data from multiple sources.
It is indeed a nice change
Oh I love the topics list. It already helped me discover a new community. I assume right now it's curated by someone, would be cool if there was a way for communities to just apply tags to themselves. They could even be turned into hashtags, whenever someone posts to that community, as a kind of link to Mastodon.
On a side-note, I just had a look at Piefed, I like their topics list: https://piefed.social/topics
Ugh, that is a total anti-feature that hides away the unique characteristics of communities and increases moderation work-load significantly :(
As someone else commented, they could work as tags that communities could apply to themselves