Yes. It’s called performance testing. Basically an engineer would need to setup test user transactions to simulate live traffic and load test the system to see how everything scales, where it breaks, etc. Then you can use the results of the tests to figure out how big of an instance you should use for your projected number of users.

Jmeter, and locust.io are the two biggest open source performance test tools.

The alternative is take a wild guess. See how the system behaves, and make adjustments in real time… like what @ruud@lemmy.world is currently doing.

That was fast…

Thank you for confirming that! I would not make sense if it didn’t count all subs including external instances.

Wait, another one? Or is this a repost of the one I already subbed to?

Hell yeah! Let’s go Padres!

I’m subbed from my instance, hakbox.social. Does that count towards the total subs? How does that work?

All my Reddit subs are slowly making it over here! Not a local anymore, but I lived a good 10 years in San Diego. I miss good burritos, especially the California Burrito.

Ideally, yes. If that can be the reality, and I suppose that is how it should would with federation, then server costs should never get out of hand.

You bring up a very good point. Currently lemmy.ml has thousands of users. Lemmy.world has thousands of users. The hardware they have selected to run their instances is adequate for now, but, what is the plan for scaling out if the user base grows? Is there one? They have a donation page on each lemmy instance (click or tap the heart icon,) but that can’t be enough to pay for the cost of running something used by millions of people, even if only 100s of thousands are ever only online at any given time.

In terms of UI/UX, @dessalines@lemmy.ml has mentioned in a post they are currently working on major performance improvements and enhancements.

Ooh, that’s a good one. I use that a lot too.

Can you elaborate on your experience a bit more? I can’t say I have had any issues as you’ve described. If something doesn’t look right, or isn’t working the way you expect, it might actually be a bug.

Very true. It would be sad to build up a persona on a smaller instance to then have it go dark and take your user with it. Other than losing your collection of “upvotes,” you can just recreate a new user with the same display name on another instance and keep going. 👍

Holy crap, you can do Slack style emoticons? Huzzah! 🎉

It’s at the top of the list on join-lemmy.org’s popular server list, next to lemmy.world and beehaw.org, of course new users will sign up on the more popular ones. Plus, a few posts on reddit called out these three which set everything in motion.

Once folks start to understand how it works, they might start to sign up on other ones, for a “cooler handle @ address” for their user, or register a domain and start their own instance like I did.

Anyway, welcome aboard, right?

3.2k users is impressive. But yes, 10 seconds is bad. 2.5 seconds is about the max I find acceptable. If you don’t mind me asking, what are you running on, in terms of hardware?

I’m tempted to fire up jmeter, or locust, or k6 and push some load against my instance to see how things look internally under load.

Thanks for this post, @ruud@lemmy.world. I’ve setup my own instance and am enjoying the lemmy experience so far.

At least the latest RC cut the post and save time in half, for me. That’s a measurable improvement. It definitely must be due to server load, as posting and saving to !lemmyworld@lemmy.world from my instance seems pretty snappy.