I did. Didn’t function at all. Had a ton of issues with the sound card and the nvidia graphics driver also shit the bed multiple times and many games didn’t work. Same for mint though.

Sorry for the silence. My years on the internet make me hesitant to claim I’ll do something publicly until I’m already almost done. Else it’s unlikely to get done and I’m then not keeping my word.

and thank you for being a great contributor to the community! this site would be nothing without all of you!

it is helping, thank you for the sponsorship. I should have migrated a long time ago because the costs really were adding up. I’ll update my sponsor page after I have a fresh month of data for the bucket costs (which are still on Vultr) and the new server costs (which hopefully should be static). Thanks for the suggestion!

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.

Oh we are getting attacked constantly, that definitely didn’t help, but a large portion of it was just thrashing from postgres not getting enough memory.

sorry for all the trouble. I would understand it if you still do, as I haven’t been the best operator.

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.

The HN comments are full of people discussing how to get around the software. This is why it costs so much to run programming.dev. People that think the cost of information should be free and that anyone they want info from should bear the cost of giving them that info.

I struggled with WinApps as well. wasn’t ever able to get gpu passthrough working either, and trying to do so really destabilized my computer. I pretty much gave up. That’s not to say that WinApps doesn’t work. It does, it’s just not near native for me. There’s definitely slowness, at least with Lightroom, I haven’t tested with PS yet, though I have installed it.

Hm. Pulsetic seems to have removed our status monitors. I have gone ahead and added the monitor back, but pulsetic seems to not want to show our status anymore. I’ll have to investigate other options for a service monitor.

I restarted the server so hopefully some stuff speeds up and your post eventually shows up.

We’ve been having problems with the whole instance being incredibly slow so I’m guessing it’s more related to that. We keep getting behind on activities anytime lemmy tries to create the aggregates.

It blocks access to the link on your site. For example, on programming.dev people have uploaded CSAM. The links are immediately blocked (e.g. no one can get to them except an instance owner actually looking in the pictrs database) and then in the CF dashboard you get a notification with the link to the webpage it occurred on.

CSAM blocking works based on a known agreed upon, shared hash list which is created by a consortium of large tech giants. If novel CSAM is uploaded to your instance, then yes, it will fail to catch that. db0’s plugin might catch it though. LLM blocking doesn’t have the benefit of a bunch of multi billion dollar companies trying to stop it, in fact they’re doing the exact opposite, so yes LLM blocking sucks.

For your edit, I would expect you to have an email set up that you would get the notice from. You are not responsible for this kind of stuff until you have been notified, pretty much globally, so pay attention to your email.

You can set up Cloudflare as your CDN and turn on CSAM detection. It will automatically block links to known CSAM from the managed global CSAM hash lists.

If you want something in addition to that, you can use db0’s plugin that adds in a similar capability.

barely receives any updates even from the public.

what do you mean by this?

about 50% of traffic to programming.dev is bots who have marked their user-agents as such. I’m pretty confident the actual number is higher, but haven’t spent time validating.

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.

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