My main account is dark_arc@social.packetloss.gg. However, as of roughly 24-hours ago (it seems this has been going on since March 10th and gotten worse since) it seems like the server has stopped properly retrieving content from lemmy.world.
It’s been running smoothly for well over 9 months, and (I think) working fine for content coming in from other instances. So I’m curious if anyone else experienced anything strange with lemmy.world federation recently?
The server flow in my case is as follows:
[Public Internet] <-> [Digital Ocean Droplet] <-> [ZeroTier] <-> [Physical Machine in my Basement (HW Info)]
The Digital Ocean droplet is a virtual host machine that forwards requests via nginx to the physical machine where a second nginx server (running the standard lemmy nginx config) then forwards the request to the lemmy server software itself.
I’ve found this is my lemmy logs:
2024-03-24T00:42:10.062274Z WARN lemmy_utils: error in spawn: Unknown: Request limit was reached during fetch
0: lemmy_apub::objects::community::from_json
at crates/apub/src/objects/community.rs:126
1: lemmy_apub::fetcher::user_or_community::from_json
at crates/apub/src/fetcher/user_or_community.rs:87
2: lemmy_server::root_span_builder::HTTP request
with http.method=POST http.scheme="http" http.host=social.packetloss.gg http.target=/inbox otel.kind="server" request_id=688ad030-f892-4925-9ce9-fc4f3070a967
at src/root_span_builder.rs:16
I’m thinking this could be the cause … though I’m not sure how to raise the limit (it seems to be hard coded). I opened an issue with the Lemmy devs but I’ve since closed it while gathering more information/making sure this is truly an issue with the Lemmy server software.
I’m seeing the digital ocean nginx server reporting 499 on various “/inbox” route requests and I’m seeing the nginx running on the physical machine that talks directly to lemmy reporting 408 on various “/inbox” route requests.
There are some examples in this comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/8728858
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
[Thread #624 for this sub, first seen 23rd Mar 2024, 17:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Checking lemmy.world federation status at: https://phiresky.github.io/lemmy-federation-state/site?domain=lemmy.world . There, you can see that social.packetloss.gg is listed among the “407 failing instances”.
You’ll need to check if your server actually configured to receive federation traffics. If you’re using cloudflare or some other web application firewall, make sure they’re not doing any anti bots measures on the
/inbox
endpoint. For example, in Cloudflare, create a new WAF rule (Security -> WAF) for/inbox
and set it to skip all security.If you don’t use any web application firewall at all, did you just upgraded your instance from v18.x to v19.x recently right before experiencing federation issue? v19.x has increased resource consumption and will have problem running on small server after running for a while. For small VPS (~4GB of RAM), you might want to adjust database pool_size to <30 on
lemmy.hjson
file. Restarting lemmy AND postgres every once in a while also helps if you’re on a small VPS.It’s been up on 19.x for a few months now. It’s also a full on bare metal server with a ton of resources, it’s not at all starved.
It’s almost like someone posted something to somewhere that “jammed” Lemmy and it just won’t get past it but I’m not sure how to figure out what that would be or how to unjam things.
Could be postgres-related. Federation is only “jammed” if the source instance thinks your instance is having an issue because it takes too long to respond. Maybe enabling slow query log on postgres and then reviewing that log could point you in the right direction.
Using that site and doing my instance to Lemmyworld , your site is listed under the working ones. I know spam has been on the rise again on big instances, so that could be playing a part in this also.
Here’s a handy site to check your federation status: https://phiresky.github.io/lemmy-federation-state/site?domain=social.packetloss.gg
It looks like all the sites are lagging, which can sometimes mean there is an issue. What’s the specs of the server? Can you try restarting it and seeing if that helps?
There are issues for servers hosted in places like Australia because of the latency in communicating with .world due to how big it is and how much data it sends because of this.
This is the right answer
So, I think this is a (helpful) general comment but wrong in this/my specific case.
The server is so small it’s not really going to register on a 10-minute frequency for outgoing content – I’m not that much of a lemmy addict! haha.
You can see in a comment here my most recent comment to lemmy.world did sync: https://lemmy.world/comment/8728858
I’m not having any issues with outgoing content, beehaw, the KDE instance, and several others. It’s just lemmy.world that’s acting up (which is unfortunately because it’s my favorite – I mod/run several communities and donate to here/them – haha).
I’m not having issues that I’m aware of, but that site always returns Network Request Failed and I haven’t figured out why.
How can you check?
If you’re running it in docker you can just check the logs, I do it like this:
docker compose logs -f lemmy
, and see if you have requests from any instance in the log stream. For me it goes pretty fast, but you can always ctrl+c to exit and scroll up to see what you’ve missed. Might not be the most optimal way, but it works for me.I have the same issue. I have a very small instance and lemmy.world seems to not work no matter what I do. I can get lemmy ml no issues and done if the others but for done reason world just won’t work with and communities, like everything is blacklisted or something.
I’m one of a whole 2 users at lemmy.starlightkel.xyz and we’re seeing lemmy.world content no problem right now.
Similar for my instance.
Yeah I’m basically the only user of this server. Good data point that you’re not having issues though.
If your failing on Lemmy.world like others suggest, but federation is working with others, it’s likely you are getting large queries that are timing out with lemmy.world. You can check for timeouts in your proxy’s logs.
Troubleshooting tips
This guide is for tuning postgres if you find it is an issue. This has good tips and tips on how to analyze issues on postgres. It’s oriented for matrix tuning though. work_mem and temp files likely will need constant tuning to meet your demands if you have limited memory for postgres.
Lastly I wanted to note that Lemmy does application connection pooling, so if you have a Pooler service behind postgres, dont, let Lemmy connect directly to postgres
Hope these help. I went from a recent 1 million federation backlog in lemmy.world to near none. I believe I am at a ram limit and a couple expensive queries (deleting posts for example) are creating temp files and taking too long.
So, I think you’re most on the right track of the responses…
It seems to just be exclusively incoming from lemmy.world. If you look here, my most recent comment is on lemmy.world:
https://social.packetloss.gg/comment/1415801 https://lemmy.world/comment/8710941
The instance just isn’t getting any new posts, comments, or votes back from lemmy.world.
Everytime I shut down the lemmy server I see this:
That number never seems to move, there are always 1618 works. I’m not sure if that means anything or not regarding pending processing or what have you.
I am seeing in my publicly facing nginx logs:
There’s then an internal nginx server that sees:
So, things did start timing out. I’m not sure what to do about that though.
This server is not resource starved:
It’s just this lemmy.world data that’s suddenly out of wack after months of normal operation (both on lemmy 18 and 19).
It feels like a bad payload that the server just can’t move past for some reason and lemmy.world keeps sending.
I had logging on the lemmy container itself piped to /dev/null because it’s just such a noisy log. I turned it back on… I’ll see if I can find more information next time lemmy.world posts.
Another note you want to have a round trip from federation in under 3 seconds. Those 499 are likely 10 second timeouts from Lemmy.worlds side. Mostly from a long query being the culprit. Lemmy federation in 0.19 processes changes in order per instance so lemmy.world won’t sync newer stuff and keep sending the same large request. I believe there is a retry limit though.
Yeah, I mean things should be fine in general; like I said this has been working for quite a long time now without issue.
The machine that’s actually doing the work here is quite powerful and is used to run several game servers in addition to Lemmy … Lemmy really isn’t much more than footnote in resource usage:
How much RAM is postgres using? I’m running on i7 11th Gen and 16gb of RAM so your hardware is fine. This is the resource usage of my setup. First 6 are Lemmy itself broken up to scale and for redundancy. I have a node down right now normally using 3 http ones. Http ones receive federation from others and the lemmy-instance2s are the databases setup to be highly available too.
NAME CPU(cores) MEMORY(bytes)
lemmy-6b9fbd75f6-4q4n8 1m 5Mi
lemmy-fed-0 2m 18Mi
lemmy-fed-1 1m 18Mi
lemmy-fed-2 6m 17Mi
lemmy-http-57886f784f-5x9vb 4m 73Mi
lemmy-http-57886f784f-tpbtb 13m 121Mi
lemmy-instance2-czc6-0 47m 3362Mi
lemmy-instance2-jpw7-0 13m 1017Mi
Not sure what you’re using to generate that list/formatting is a bit difficult.
I don’t have a cluster since it’s effectively single user + @Auto_Post_Bot@social.packetloss.gg (in theory a few other people have access, but they’re not active), single machine, it’s just more or less the out of the box docker stuff on a bare metal machine in my basement + a digital ocean droplet.
The droplet is what I’m using to have a static IP to prevent dynamic DNS nonsense + it provides some level of protection against a naive DDoS attack on random fediverse servers (since I can in the worst case, get on my phone and severe the ZeroTier connection that’s using to connect the droplet to my basement server).
I’m pretty confident whatever is going on is payload related at this point.
I’ve got quite a bit of experience with postgres; I don’t see any indication it’s the problem.