"Is the fediverse about to get Fryed? (Or, 'Why every toot is also a potential denial of service attack')" by @aral https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed-or-why-every-toot-is-also-a-potential-denial-of-service-attack/
Great summary of the problem, although I don't think there is anything malicious behind these performance issues. My hunch (read: wild-ass guess) is that performance has just not been a huge concern for Mastodon until now, and so now we're feeling the effects. Also: it's hard to measure/predict perf in a federated network.
The perf issues are bad enough that Wired is writing about it: https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-users-mastodon-meltdown/
And Mastodon admins are having to get creative: https://blog.freeradical.zone/post/surviving-thriving-through-2022-11-05-meltdown/
Here on toot.cafe, Sidekiq queues have been backed up for days, and I will probably not see your response to this toot until tomorrow. 😅 And that's despite the fact that 1) I bumped the EC2 instance side from t3.medium to t3.xlarge, 2) I added a 2nd Sidekiq process, and 3) registrations have been closed for years. (Just returning users!)
@nolan It's worth noting that these really seem to be performance issues contained to specific (overloaded) instances; this instance doesn't have open signups, and I've pretty much not seen any performance degradation on this end, which suggests that it's not a "cascade" across the network at least.
