musk_micropenis
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Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
I would like to understand why Mastodon requires such a huge amount of hardware for mediocre traffic volumes. Not just the lazy "it's Rails" answer - I know Rails is a resource hog, but that doesn't go far enough to explain the extreme requirements here.
As a point of reference, look at what Stack Overflow is run on. As a caveat, SO is probably more read-heavy than Mastodon, but it also serves several orders of magnitude more volume (on a normal day in 2016 they would serve 209,420,973 HTTP requests[0]). They did this on 4 DB servers and 11 web servers. And in fact, it can (and has) worked serving this volume of traffic on only a single server.
With this setup SO was not even close to maxing out their hardware (servers were under 10% load, approximately). SO also listed their server hardware[1] in 2016. I don't know enough about server hardware to assess the difference, but to my eye they look similar on the web tier with similar amounts of memory, similar disk, etc.
I'm not saying Hachyderm is doing anything wrong, but it makes me wonder if there's a fundamental problem with the design of Mastodon. And to be clear I understand that this particular issue was caused by a disk failure, but that they even had this hardware in place running Hachyderm is surprising to me.
[0] https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...
[1] https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...
Comment · 3 years ago
No, because a single instance needed to "scale up" at a very small user count.
> but it makes me wonder if there's a fundamental problem with the design of Mastodon.
I also note the article says,
> During the month of November we averaged 36.86 Mbps in traffic with samples taken every hour
That seems like a large amount of bandwidth to service 30,000 users (who knows what fraction of them are actually active at any given moment). But I guess there's going to be a lot of video and image content. I have tried searching all of their linked blog posts about scaling but can't find any number that might map to requests per second without making huge assumptions.