So I’ve been troubleshooting the federation issues with some other admins:
(Thanks for the help)
So what we see is that when there are many federation workers running at the same time, they get too slow, causing them to timeout and fail.
I had federation workers set to 200000. I’ve now lowered that to 8192, and set the activitypub logging to debugging to get queue stats. RUST_LOG="warn,lemmy_server=warn,lemmy_api=warn,lemmy_api_common=warn,lemmy_api_crud=warn,lemmy_apub=warn,lemmy_db_schema=warn,lemmy_db_views=warn,lemmy_db_views_actor=warn,lemmy_db_views_moderator=warn,lemmy_routes=warn,lemmy_utils=warn,lemmy_websocket=warn,activitypub_federation=debug"
Also, I saw that there were many workers retrying to servers that are unreachable. So, I’ve blocked some of these servers:
commallama.social,mayheminc.win,lemmy.name,lm.runnerd.net,frostbyrne.io,be-lemmy.org,lemmonade.marbledfennec.net,lemmy.sarcasticdeveloper.com,lemmy.kosapps.com,pawb.social,kbin.wageoffsite.com,lemmy.iswhereits.at,lemmy.easfrq.live,lemmy.friheter.com,lmy.rndmm.us,kbin.korgen.xyz
This gave good results, way less active workers, so less timeouts. (I see that above 3000 active workers, timeouts start).
(If you own one of these servers, let me know once it’s back up, so I can un-block it)
Now it’s after midnight so I’m going to bed. Surely more troubleshooting will follow tomorrow and in the weekend.
Please let me know if you see improvements, or have many issues still.
Holy fuck 200k workers!? I’m not familiar with lemmy internals but I’ve literally never seen any program run anything close to well at levels that high. Want some help from someone who is a DevOps engineer by day? I think I remember you said you were a psql dba professionally so maybe my experience could help out?
Thanks, made a note of that
they should make a union
I want to say that with 0.18 the definition of federation_workers has changed massively due to the improved queue. As in, whatever is good in 0.17 is not necessarily good for 0.18.
On 0.18, it probably makes sense to have it around 100 to 10’000. Setting it to 0 is also be an option (unlimited, that’s the default). Anything much higher is probably a bad idea.
On 0.18, retry tasks are also split into a separate queue which should improve things in general.
0 might have perf issues since every federation task is one task with the same scheduling priority as any other async task (like ui / user api requests). So if 10k federation tasks are running and 100 api requests are running then tokio will schedule the api requests with probability 100 / (10k+100) (if everything is cpu-limited). (I think, not 100% sure how tokio scheduling works)
Ideally, we can fix this in the software eventually (most likely it has already been improved a lot in 0.18.1 - we’ll find out for sure when lemmy.world upgrades), but for now it really does seem that defederating offline servers will massively improve the success rate of federated posts and comments reaching other instances.
Would un-linking them be sufficient?
Yep, anything that will get your instance to stop sending activities to an unresponsive instance will help (at least for sure on 0.17.4)
EDIT: nevermind, I figured out my issue https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1862
Posted this last night, but reposting for visibility:
To those experiencing federation issues with communities that aren’t local, make sure to properly set your language in our profile! I thought my off-instance communities were having extremely slow federation, but the issue was I didn’t have English as one of my profile languages.
I’ve read about it and I don’t understand. I have a list of the languages in the settings, but I have all of them and I cannot remove or add any languages.
The list is to select from, not what you have selected. If you click one it should highlight it blue. Then hit save at the bottom of the profile.
The dialogue is very bad.
To select what languages you want, hold ctrl and click each language you want, to highlight it.
With the languages you want highlighted, save the settings.
