#MastodonSocial - heads up!

Mastodon.social's posts are not federating out in a timely fashion because another instance is lagging, which is causing mastodon.social's delivery jobs to pile up. Right now there are about 300,000 delivery jobs waiting to go out, but they're reliant on that one instance not taking 10 seconds to respond to every request.

There's not a whole lot m.s can do except wait it out; hopefully this will be resolved soon.

@noelle how does this happen? I have no idea how the protocol works but shouldn’t it like idk connect to another instance instead

@jordyd @noelle The issue is how HTML protocol requests work. In order to try and send something, it has to wait for the other server to respond to initiate the send.

The server needs to send 300,000 things to the other server. It's not smart enough to say "Hey, let's skip all the requests to this server because it's being too slow"

So it just keeps sending them, one at a time, and waiting. While it does have multiple threads to do this, it seems all are taken up with the huge load.

@viomi @noelle oh god that sounds terrible

@jordyd @noelle The solution is, we add a feature to mastodon where if after a certain amount of times trying to make a connection, it temporarily stops trying to send those requests to server 2 and somehow stores them to wait to send them until the requests to said server are going faster. Not sure if you'd throw them all in the postresql or like.. Take up a shitton of RAM temporarily

@viomi @noelle who needs a database when you have a swap file amirite

@catoutofbed explanation above