Forest @forestjohnson@pixie.town

@reese https://funkwhale.audio

@ashfurrow@masto.ashfurrow.com @nolan

I wish you the best and I hope that in the future you will have time for it, or whatever else you wanna do. I saw a lot of posts from mastodon.technology so thanks for hosting it :)

@nolan @shadowfacts Ok, reading more:

> While fibers provide a delightful interface to work with concurrency the real drawback of Ruby and other GIL (global interpreter lock) based languages is that the execution of threads is limited to only one native thread (per process) at a time.

It sounds like it's similar to Node.js, where one can make multiple-process copies of the application which collaborate.. Not unlike the signup table at a large event where you go to a different queue depending on the first letter of your last name, a-f, line 1 g-o line 2, and p-z line 3, something like that

@ashfurrow@masto.ashfurrow.com @nolan I still think that if this operation of pushing/federating posts to followers' servers was implemented in "lightweight threads / async io" all the way through, no limit on # of concurrent transactions, it would improve the throughput dramatically all on the same machine without a hardware upgrade. Especially if it can use lock-free techniques like partitioning. But also, I've never written a line of ruby nor cloned mastodon's code, so I have no idea how much of an undertaking that would really be.

@ashfurrow@masto.ashfurrow.com @nolan Ah nice, so maybe its the database driver that needs to work based on fibers instead of a fixed-size thread pool?

Or maybe a different way of doing the required transaction might free up the system from this tyrannical "12" limit.

@nolan @shadowfacts

But the "more than 1 message per mail truck" sounds like its not in the protocol. So I think fibers is the only way for mastodon.

@nolan @shadowfacts

Sorry about my super long winded, poorly written posts before, the sort of silly analogy I can make goes like this:

In the nation of Mastodon Server #42069, there is a postal service. All outgoing mail goes to the postal outbox. Postal workers drive to the outbox, pick up One (1) message, then read the URL address on it and drive to that server to deliver it. Then they drive back to the outbox & repeat. There are only 12 postal workers. Problem is that when folks follower counts start rising they start getting followers from thousands of different servers, and every time they do anything, it puts thousands of messages in that outbox. Poor 12 workers can't deliver them all 1 at a time even if they were superhuman HTTP client machines.

My opinion: remove the limit on # of postal workers completely, or, if you absolutely can't do that, then try to make more than 1 message per mail truck.