Time for a brain fart idea,

Should AZ make it a rule that articles/essays must have the author/s in the post title.

1. Better promotion of authors could help readers understand the context of the writers more, and build peoples awareness of the writers and their body of work.

To explain my thought more:

The author of something is important, maybe more important than the title. For instance a George Monbiot article is going to be very different from a Michelle Grattan article. Their worldviews are very different. Not saying either are right or wrong, but understanding that these authors don’t write these stories in a vaccum can give a better understanding of what each are trying to communicate leading, especially as familiarity builds, to better context for the reader scrolling through their feed.

2. Might make things harder for a few bot posting accounts. I don’t know, this is a side benefit at best.

As reported previously, posts from Quokkau users on AZ communities weren’t being federated so AZ and broader fediverse users could see them, but it was at least possible to manually retrieve them.

But with my latest post I was unable to even find the community I wanted to post it to, and after I created it on my AZ account, I have not been able to retrieve it on Quokkau.

I’m honestly not sure which side has the fault here or what fix would be necessary.

None of my posts (or presumably comments, though I haven’t checked) in AZ communities seem to have gotten through since 25 days ago.

• https://quokk.au/c/brisbane@aussie.zone/p/922741/plans-to-fix-dangerous-weak-link-on-cycling-route-revealed-sylvan-road-bicentennial-to-weste
• https://quokk.au/c/brisbane@aussie.zone/p/935714/how-many-free-kerbside-car-parks-does-brisbane-really-need
• https://quokk.au/c/brisbane@aussie.zone/p/935733/the-view-is-beautiful-but-this-brisbane-bench-is-a-little-bit-hostile
• https://quokk.au/c/brisbane@aussie.zone/p/950285/did-queensland-s-parliamentary-committee-ignore-the-evidence-and-act-on-their-own-emobility
• https://quokk.au/c/brisbane@aussie.zone/p/952093/the-park-the-promise-and-the-protest-what-s-behind-brisbane-s-olympic-stadium-stoush
• https://quokk.au/c/brisbane@aussie.zone/p/966593/qld-government-contemplates-ditching-anti-junk-mail-measures-and-palming-it-off-onto-council

And that’s just within !brisbane. No idea how many other posts may also have gotten lost. Not sure what’s up.

I was thinking that as it seems times aren’t going to get easier that there should be a section aiming at supporting each other with practical info and also discussing issues to do with family or solo life, children, ageing and health.

Let me know your thoughts and if you like the concept, can you think of alternative names for the community? Let’s see what we can come up with.

I’m wondering if there has been any consideration for Aussie.zone to defederate with MAGA.place?

Anyone smart enough to see why

https://aussie.zone/c/localllama@sh.itjust.works

vs

https://sh.itjust.works/c/localllama

Seems like the post itself is ok but not the upvotes, maybe just different lemmy version by 1 just enough to offset it?

Has anybody received this notification this morning?

I assume its from Dessalines or Nutomic, since it came alongside the update.

Here are two of the links:

Solution

Details

So, what does this mean for aussie.zone?

Does this mean we all need to get a Fairphone with e/os, or another non-android handset? What are the options for that?

Does this mean aussie.zone will break with the lemmy developers and become more independent? A kind of forced Fork?

Just wanting to get peoples opinions.

Don’t know if I’ll attend any,

I’ll be thinking seriously about joining the session below, seems up my alley.

Mathilde Sanders (@MathildeS@mastodon.nl) Wants to learn more about: Public (service) social media / business models non profit fediverse.

Anybody else thinking about attending?

Time out from the heavy stuff. This video is not only interesting but will put a smile on your face. It is not rude so can be shared with children (but not young ones as they may not understand) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXjfz0N_JXg

Its been 6 months or so… figure its time for another of these. Keep in mind there have been some major config changes in the last week, which has resulted in the oddities below.

Graphs below cover 2 months, except Cloudflare which only goes to 30 days on free accounts.

CPU:

Memory:

Network:

Storage:

Cloudflare caching:

Comments: The server is still happily chugging along. Looking even happier now that I’ve properly migrated pict-rs to its integrated object storage config, rather than the bodged up setup.

RAM/CPU are all fine. Storage use is growing slowly as various databases grow. Still a long way from needing to purge old posts, if ever.

Cloudflare is saving less traffic these days, since Lemmy added support to proxy all images. Not a concern, well under the bandwidth cap for the server.

As usual feel free to ask any questions.

Its been a little while since I posted stuff :)

CPU:

Memory:

Network:

Storage:

Cloudflare caching:

Comments:
Not much has changed in quite a while. I still have a cron-job running to restart Lemmy every day due to memory leaks, hopefully this improves with future updates. Outside of that, CPU, memory and network usage are fine.
Object storage usage is growing steadily, but we’re a long way from paying more than the monthly minimum Wasabi fee.

CPU:

Memory:

Network:

Storage:

Cloudflare caching:

Summary:

Not much to call out. The storage drop was due to purging a days worth of images, and clearing the entire object storage cache. When I have time, I’ll upgrade the VPS to add storage.

CPU:

Memory:

Network:

The one spike here is from a DB backup being uploaded to object storage, prior to the upgrade to 0.18.4.

Storage:

Still ok here. You can see the daily minimum free space increase as I tweak the local cache for object storage.

Cloudflare caching:

Summary:

Nothing of note here. Once baseline storage hits ~70% and I decreasing the object storage retention period is no longer worthwhile, I’ll upgrade the server for more storage.

CPU:

Memory:

Network:

Storage:

Cloudflare caching:

Summary:

My only call out this week is an uptick in storage consumption, seems to align with an increase in new user signups and general higher activity. I’m guessing this is due to the release of Sync for Lemmy.

CPU:

Memory:

Network:

Storage:

Cloudflare caching:

Summary:

All resource usage looking stable. Storage is the only one that is trending up, as expected.

Another week… another bunch of nerd graphs!

CPU:

Not much to say here, pretty stable CPU usage wise.

Memory:

The unusual memory growth appears to have been related to a minor Postgres configuration change I made last week, which was reverted on Thursday. Memory usage looking much more normal since.

Network:

As with CPU usage, network traffic is looking stable.

Storage:

Storage growth has normalized, now that we’ve hit an equilibrium point. Though I’ll be tweaking the object storage cache retention to minimise object storage pulls.

Cloudflare caching:

Still saving us a large volume of egress traffic. Will save even more if particular content goes viral.

Summary:

Resource utilisation on the server is looking great across the board. No skyrocketing usage as we saw initially. Storage is still looking like the first trigger for another server upgrade, but as it is now a gradual increase we’ll have plenty of fore warning and its looking like this will be some time away.

Questions? 🤓

Doh! Forgot earlier in the night, so here you are… technically Saturday.

CPU:

The lemmy devs have made some major strides in improving performance recently, as you can see by the overall reduced CPU load.

Memory:

I need to figure out why swap is continuing to be used, when there is cache/buffer available to be used. But as you can see, the upgrade to 8GB of RAM is being put to good use.

Network:

The two large spikes here are from some backups being uploaded to object storage. Apart from that, traffic levels are fine.

Storage:

A HUGE win here this week, turns out a huge portion of the database is data we don’t need, and can be safely deleted pretty much any time. The large drop in storage on the 9th was from me manually deleting all but the most recent ~100k rows in the guilty table. Devs are aware of this issue, and are actively working on making DB storage more efficient. While a better fix is being worked on, I have a cronjob running every hour to delete all but the most recent 200k rows.

Cloudflare caching:

Cloudflare still saving us substantial egress traffic from the VPS, though no 14MB “icons” being grabbed thousands of times this week 😀

Summary:

All things considered, we’re in a much better place today than a week ago. Storage is much less of a concern, and all other server resources are doing well… though I need to investigate swap usage.

Longer term it still looks as though storage will become the trigger for further upgrades. However storage growth will be much more slow and under our control. The recent upward trend is predominantly from locally cached images from object storage, which can be deleted at any time as required.

As usual, feel free to ask questions.

Another week… another set of nerd graphs!

CPU:

Some of the variations in CPU usage in the last week correlate with upgrades to the lemmy software. If you look closely, you can see a drop in CPU usage starting late on Thursday, this was when I upgraded to 0.18.1-rc.10 which includes some major DB query optimisations.

Memory:

The spikey memory utilisation between the 28th of June and the 4th of July were due to a lemmy software issue. It resulted in huge resource consumption for varying amounts of time, before returning to normal. This specific issue seems to have been resolved in one of the upates this week.

Network:

The unusually high traffic levels between the 1st and 4th were caused by a large community icon… 14MB. Thankfully, Cloudflare saved us by caching this file and saved us ~800GB of traffic on this file alone before it was shrunk to a more appropriate size 🙂

Storage:

As expected, disk space is being used up at a relatively consistent rate. The drop on the 28th was when cached object storage images were deleted due to a server reboot that was required when adding 2 vCPUs. I have a scheduled job that runs every hour to delete cached objects older than a threshold. As the disk used by the cache increases (or the disk gets closer to being full), I’ll decrease the age threshold.

Cloudflare caching:

Cloudflare caching is saving us a lot of egress traffic. It is saving us less since the 14MB “icon” was shrunk, however this shows the value in the service. Even now, it is saving ~40GB of egress traffic per day.

Summary

Everything is looking pretty good right now, thanks mostly to the ongoing improvements in lemmy making things run more smoothly. In the next week or so I’ll be upgrading the storage on the VPS to cater for the ever increasing database. Admins are already discussing ways we can manage the increasing storage requirements, I’m optimistic we’ll have good solutions before we hit a VPS scaling limit.

As always, happy to answer any questions.

Ok, its been a week since I posted graphs… so here are graphs for the last 2 weeks for my fellow nerds. Commentary at the bottom…

CPU:

Memory:

Network:

Storage:

So… why the drop in traffic from the 24th? That is the day I put the server behind Cloudflare. At the time, traffic was increasing substantially and looking to become a trigger for a server upgrade; OVH provide increased traffic quotas with larger VPS offerings. Rather than spend more money, I thought I’d test the site behind Cloudflare. So far so good. No issues have been reported, and I’ve observed none. And in that time we’ve saved ~300GB through Cloudflare’s caching, equivalent to 10% of the monthly bandwidth quota currently:

As for the drop in used storage on Wednesday, this was due to cached object storage images being deleted from /tmp when the server was rebooted to add 2 vCPUs. This is harmless, any images are automatically retrieved from Wasabi and cached locally again.

Any questions, feel free to ask.

Hi all.

With the success of the last week it looks like this place will be around for a while longer. To that end, I’ve created a Ko-fi profile where you can contribute to covering the ongoing costs associated with running Aussie.Zone, if you feel inclined.

There is no pressure to do this right now. Some have asked, and for me if the costs are covered its one less thing to think about. I’m ok covering the current costs associated with the site. However there will come a point I’ll need to ask for contributions or shut the site down.

Read on if you’re interested in my thoughts on where additional costs will arise for the operation of the site, otherwise… have a nice day :)

Immediate

Current costs for running Aussie.Zone are:

• OVH VPS ~$66 AUD per month
• Wasabi object storage for images ~$11 AUD ($5.99 USD per month)
• OVH VPS automated backups $11 AUD per month

Medium term

Based on what I’ve seen so far, I expect the next pain point on the server will be needing either more CPU, or storage for the database. CPU usage is driven by local instance user count, storage more so by volume of posts across the wider fediverse.

Either of these is addressed by the current OVH VPS - “Comfort”. RAM and storage can be upgraded independently for different prices.

Longer term…

Domain renewal with Porkbun ~$35 AUD ($24 USD)
Database storage… is going to be the killer of instances. OVH VPSs can be scaled up to 640GB for $160 AUD per month. But at that price we’re into dedicated server territory.

Any questions, feel free to ask.

Ledger

This will detail cashflows associated with aussie.zone. Initial costs including domain registration (ends June 8 2024) and 1st month hosting (ends July 8th 2023) paid by me.

June 15 2023: $0 starting figure
June 15 2023: +$150 in donations 🎉
June 17 2023: -$8 enabled OVH VPS backups, pro-rata fee
June 23 2023: +$70 in donations (~$210 balance) 🎉