I’m a staff software engineer at Sunrun, the USA’s largest residential solar installer.

I mostly work with kotlin, but also java, python, ruby, javascript, typescript. My hobby is picking up new hobbies. Currently bird photography and camping.

  • 17 Posts
  • 393 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • programming.dev is the 9th largest lemmy server. https://join-lemmy.org/instances

    That stat was probably that low due to the server being down for around 90% of the last two weeks. If you look now it’s at 220 and it will continue to go up.

    On top of that, every action on every server that is federated is relayed to every instance. So all of lemmy.world’s activity is still relayed to us and we have to handle it. Same for the other servers.

    On top of that we also operate many other services:

    • bytes.programming.dev
    • git.programming.dev
    • blocks.programming.dev
    • etc (there’s a lot)

    But really it was mostly just postgres thrashing on all the requests. Here’s a look at our Cloudflare dashboard for number of requests:

    Yes this should be handle-able by a server that small (think actor paradigm), but I was unable to tune postgres to get it to that point as I’m not great at database stuff. I’m sure a DBA would have done a better job. I will note that some of the queries being used in the lemmy code are very badly optimized and were taking 20+ seconds to run each time, locking up the instance. With that on top of some other badly optimized selects for things like reading comments (which would take like 7s mean), there wasn’t much I could do.

    With the cost difference it was well worth it to just upgrade to a cheaper better server all around.




  • Hetzner. Honestly every provider was cheaper. I literally didn’t find a single provider that was even close to as expensive as Vultr. You can look at Vultr’s deploy page here (might need to be logged in for that). For 16GB of RAM on any product, the minimum cost is $80 a month. We were paying $120+.

    It’s honestly crazy how expensive Vultr is. The servers might have better processors, didn’t really check that, but all our performance depends on RAM and cores, so none of that really matters.

    Also was able to get 64GB of ECC RAM on Hetzner. No clue if Vultr provided that, but they don’t list it anywhere.

    Providers I looked at:

    • Scaleway
    • Hetzner
    • Contabo
    • Netcup
    • OVH
    • Space Hosting
    • I think one more, but can’t remember it right now.


  • I’m honestly astounded at how many people are suggesting Mint. I recently switched full time to linux and even as a software dev, Mint has to be one of the worst experiences I’ve had with a computer. Not only driver issues, but software issues and general buginess. Along with being butt-ugly, I do not think any windows user is going to confuse Mint for Windows.

    I switched my wife to Bazzite (not necessarily recommending that) and she literally didn’t notice it was a different operating system (even though I told her it was and walked her through it). Bazzite has a nice UI for installing pretty much anything a normie would be thinking to install. The only issue we’ve had so far is that Dropbox just outright does not work on it. I’ve filed a bug with them and have been awaiting a response from their dev team for like two months now. I’m sure they’ll fix it eventually, but if you need the Dropbox UI (you can use rsync otherwise) then don’t choose Bazzite.

    As for myself, after trying out like 6 different OSes, I settled on CachyOS. There are still issues, but it’s pretty dang stable and they’re very fast to fix issues. It’s not for a person not willing to touch a terminal at least once though.






  • yes sorry, I have a goal to get set up with an open sponsor, but just haven’t. Currently in regards to funding I am $1000 short for the last year, so I definitely need to get the open sponsor set up because lots of people are only willing to fund that way (which I completely understand). And that’s just for base infrastructure. I would like to pay the admins as well.



  • This community is a meta community for the programming.dev Lemmy instance. We do not run a mastodon server. This is also not a programming help community, it’s for discussing issues with the Lemmy instance. From what you’ve written it seems like you’re having trouble with a mastodon API and it would probably be better to ask for help in a community geared toward that.