Lemmy.zip Server Update July 2025
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Hello all!
What a weird month it has been.
The biggest piece of news is the impending closure of lemm.ee. We've been fortunate enough to be recommended by a lot of people so have taken in a large amount lemmeegrants/refulemm.ees.
If you have come from lemm.ee and not seen our welcome post yet, then please Click Here!
Server Updates
Since the closure announcement of Lemm.ee we've taken in over 800 new accounts. We have also been made the default instance of the Voyager app, which has seen some new users directed our way.
This has been great for helping to grow the instance, but has really introduced some performance flaws when a user imports their account settings. For most people this is usually not noticeable, but if you import a very large settings file, it can actually bring the server to a standstill. For example, here's one that brought the server to a crawl for 30 minutes:
Therefore please really consider if you do need to import your file.
Thankfully the other 99% of the time the server is performing great even with an extra 800 monthly users.
You may remember from last month we were getting a bit crushed under what we assumed was scraper traffic. After investigations, tweaks, and implementing cloudflare challenges on suspected badly behaving ASNs, we've seen a massive reduction in this, and almost an elimination of 5xx errors (except when, you know, I break something!)
So outside of the imports, server performance is looking much better. We will see how things get on with any extra traffic we do get, and we will upgrade if we need to.
We also created a Piefed server - Piefed.zip! - More info can be found in this thread
Finally, we also updated to Lemmy 0.19.12. This went without issue, but took a little longer than expected sorry!
Donations
Lemmy.zip only continues to exist because of the generous donations of its users. The operating cost of Lemmy.zip is over 60 euros a month ($60, £50) and is mostly funded by the community!
We keep all the details around donations on our OpenCollective page, with full transparency around income and expenditure.
If you're enjoying Lemmy.zip, please check out the OpenCollective page, we have a selection of one-off or recurring donation options. All funds go directly to hosting the site and keeping the virtual lights on.
We've also put up a link to our Ko-Fi page where you can donate via paypal instead of using a card. All Ko-Fi donations will be totalled up and added to OpenCollective each month for transparency. I've added a link in the sidebar, but you can also click the image below to go there:
We continue to have some really kind and generous donators and I can't express my thanks enough.
You can see all the kind donators in the Thank You thread - you could get your name in there too!Please remember, traditional social media is only "free" to you because they sell your data. We don't do that - if you want to support independent social websites like this one and you value your privacy, please consider a small donation. It really does help.
Graphs
This the actual fun stuff.
CPU over last 30 days (and yes, the spikes are imports!)
RAM usage over last 30 days (also affected by imports)
Disk space (really not that exciting)
Nginx connections
5xx errors
Lemmy database size
Images:
Cloudflare overview:
Requests:
Bandwidth:
Unique visitors:
Traffic:
Sorry this one is a bit briefer than usual - off on a little holiday so lots of packing to do, and not much time!
Hope everyone has a nice July!
Thanks
Demigodrick
-
Hello all!
What a weird month it has been.
The biggest piece of news is the impending closure of lemm.ee. We've been fortunate enough to be recommended by a lot of people so have taken in a large amount lemmeegrants/refulemm.ees.
If you have come from lemm.ee and not seen our welcome post yet, then please Click Here!
Server Updates
Since the closure announcement of Lemm.ee we've taken in over 800 new accounts. We have also been made the default instance of the Voyager app, which has seen some new users directed our way.
This has been great for helping to grow the instance, but has really introduced some performance flaws when a user imports their account settings. For most people this is usually not noticeable, but if you import a very large settings file, it can actually bring the server to a standstill. For example, here's one that brought the server to a crawl for 30 minutes:
Therefore please really consider if you do need to import your file.
Thankfully the other 99% of the time the server is performing great even with an extra 800 monthly users.
You may remember from last month we were getting a bit crushed under what we assumed was scraper traffic. After investigations, tweaks, and implementing cloudflare challenges on suspected badly behaving ASNs, we've seen a massive reduction in this, and almost an elimination of 5xx errors (except when, you know, I break something!)
So outside of the imports, server performance is looking much better. We will see how things get on with any extra traffic we do get, and we will upgrade if we need to.
We also created a Piefed server - Piefed.zip! - More info can be found in this thread
Finally, we also updated to Lemmy 0.19.12. This went without issue, but took a little longer than expected sorry!
Donations
Lemmy.zip only continues to exist because of the generous donations of its users. The operating cost of Lemmy.zip is over 60 euros a month ($60, £50) and is mostly funded by the community!
We keep all the details around donations on our OpenCollective page, with full transparency around income and expenditure.
If you're enjoying Lemmy.zip, please check out the OpenCollective page, we have a selection of one-off or recurring donation options. All funds go directly to hosting the site and keeping the virtual lights on.
We've also put up a link to our Ko-Fi page where you can donate via paypal instead of using a card. All Ko-Fi donations will be totalled up and added to OpenCollective each month for transparency. I've added a link in the sidebar, but you can also click the image below to go there:
We continue to have some really kind and generous donators and I can't express my thanks enough.
You can see all the kind donators in the Thank You thread - you could get your name in there too!Please remember, traditional social media is only "free" to you because they sell your data. We don't do that - if you want to support independent social websites like this one and you value your privacy, please consider a small donation. It really does help.
Graphs
This the actual fun stuff.
CPU over last 30 days (and yes, the spikes are imports!)
RAM usage over last 30 days (also affected by imports)
Disk space (really not that exciting)
Nginx connections
5xx errors
Lemmy database size
Images:
Cloudflare overview:
Requests:
Bandwidth:
Unique visitors:
Traffic:
Sorry this one is a bit briefer than usual - off on a little holiday so lots of packing to do, and not much time!
Hope everyone has a nice July!
Thanks
Demigodrick
I didn’t know user settings can be very large. Isn’t it just subscriptions and saved posts/comments?
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I didn’t know user settings can be very large. Isn’t it just subscriptions and saved posts/comments?
Yeah I'd also like to know more about why there's such huge usage spikes from the import process
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Yeah I'd also like to know more about why there's such huge usage spikes from the import process
If the server doesn't know the followed communities or saved posts yet, it has to fetch them from the origin instance. Which also means fetching the author profiles and some other stuff.
