Sync was released recently, and - like many apps before it - directed its users to lemmy.world as a 'default' instance, so they've had an influx of users to contend with.
Also, if you ask for the 'next page' of communities via their API, it'll just keep feeding you the same ones, over and over, even if you ask for Page 1 Billion, so there's probably some bots, crawlers, front-ends etc thrashing the hell out of it.
I don't know about DDoS attacks, but while they're happening, it seems to act a catch-all to blame any problems on.
It's really getting old. But if it's DDoS attacks, I'm not giving up. I might if it was just repeated resource issues, but I refused to be pushed by assholes.
On that score, there's not much use trying to reason it out. The 4chan types seem to like kicking down other people's sandcastles. It doesn't buy them anything, they just seem to get off on increasing unhappiness.
I’d personally blame Slovenia, but that might be unfair as there is no evidence or motive. They may still be behind my late car payment, though. In all seriousness, no one knows but the admins have posted about it weekly.
I know scaling DBs can be tricky, but I also know there are bootstrap solutions that go pretty high up before needing custom work.
I don't know enough about the lemmy infrastructure, but did they build some custom thing scratch framework or did they start with something stable and tested?
Lemmy uses the Diesel ORM. Lemmy uses a large collection of Rust libraries, so I guess you could say they rolled their own framework. I've never encountered a framework that I believe could handle non-trivial high-traffic web applications. I worked on a project that used Django for years. By the time we were done, we bypassed almost all of Django's functionality to get it to scale with our data and users.
I'm completely ok with this happening, it is to be expected with a project of this magnitude.
Be prepared, have a second account on another instance.
What I find strange is the absence of communication. This is the third day with major issues and I haven't seen an announcement. Or even just people talking about it? Nothing (until now). I might have missed it all, but I used the search function with no luck
I agree completely, and posted this question from an alternate account. The admins have been so transparent, the silence on this issue seems really weird. Even the posts on the instance status site are relatively cryptic. I posted this question because it's frustrating not knowing what's going on.