I miss the days when the internet was populated largely by nerds aiming to make a better world
The BBS and early Internet days were dominated by people who read non-fiction books. RTFM was a common saying in those days.
does anyone else feel enslaved?
“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?”
Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death
It was not about outbound federation messages. It was about counting the number of comments and posts for the sidebar on the right of lemmy-ui to show statistics about the content. site_aggregates is about counting.
The issue isn't who fixed it it, the issue is the lack of testing to find these bugs. It was there for years before anyone noticed it was hammering PostgreSQL on every new comment and post to update data that the code never read back.
There have been multiple data overrun situations, wasting server resources.
On Saturday July 22, 2023... the SysOp of Lemmy.ca got so frustrated with constant overload crashes they cloned their PostgreSQL database and ran AUTO_EXPLAIN on it. They found 1675 rows being written to disk (missive I/O, PostgreSQL WAL activity) for every single UPDATE SQL to a comment/post. They shared details on Github and the PostgreSQL TRIGGER that Lemmy 0.18.2 and earlier had was scrutinized.
I'll add some testing code to lemmy for that.