I did one final tune-up for my 1GB RAM Akkoma instance earlier today — I optimized the Posgres DB as per this Akkoma guide: https://docs.akkoma.dev/stable/configuration/postgresql/ and the help of PGTune: https://pgtune.leopard.in.ua/

Just adding a swap file (earlier) seemed to make things so much better and I can't say for certain that the Postgres tuning made a huge difference ... or not. But CPU load has certainly gone down a lot and the memory usage, while still substantial, is not always at a 100%. In fact, since the above changes, I don't believe memory usage has topped 90%.

So that's where it is after 24 hours of running the Akkoma server. This server incidentally has nothing else on it except for Akkoma 🙂

I'm adding some charts for the 24-hour period so that you can see how it's gone so far — where the lines plunge suddenly today is from around the time the swap file was added and the Postgres tuning done, one after the other with maybe 15 minutes interval in between.

#Akkoma #Ubuntu #Server #VPS
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A Great Gray Owl sitting pretty for a portrait, Missoula, Montana, spring 2022. Photo by Chase Miller.

I'd like to spend the weekend focusing on the black, indigenous, and PoC creatives in the community here, in an effort to amplify their voices with the reach of this account.

If you'd like to share your work (this includes art, craft, writing, music, dance - anything creative), comment below; introduce yourself, say a bit about your work, and link to any of your posts that you'd like to highlight, including shop/support links! <3

(Fixed for increased inclusion <3)

Wanted: a true #lancashire accent!

My daughter's undergraduate linguistics project needs a recording of a person who was born in #lancashire and who has lived there throughout their life, so their vowels are unsullied by southern tones.

All that's required is a short recording of a word list.

The project is an analysis of the effect on vowel sound on people who are brought up in one part of the UK and later move elsewhere.

If you can help, please DM or reply. Otherwise pls boost Thanks!

Um bom dia para todos 😃🌿🎋🌧️🙏

A purple coneflower Echinacea Purpurea.

See more HERE: https://5-tanya-smith.pixels.com/featured/echinacea-purpurea-flower-tanya-c-smith.html

#Flower #FloralArt #ArtMatters #AYearForArt #prints #photography #PhotographyIsArt #mastoart #mastodonart

@deltatux Ah, that would explain it 🙂 I think I even read something about that (about needing to have /web for the URL) but it didn't register. Thanks! At the moment, I'm just trying out the available frontends to see if I like any of 'em ... If not, I guess I go hunting for custom ones ...

@deltatux I wasn't even trying to set up something unsupported 🙂 I simply wanted to switch over to mastodon-fe to see how it compared to pleroma-fe but when I set the active theme to mastodon-fe and refresh the site I simply get the initial site you get before a frontend is installed. But if switch the primary back to pleroma-fe, it works.

Haven't done any digging into this yet since I was working on the memory issues till now. But maybe this is a known issue and I'm missing something obvious?

@deltatux I actually did the PGTune changes while I was writing up the last message to you and restarted Postgres somewhere after I sent it ... So far, it does seem to be performing better.

CPU load dropped dramatically (4 - 6% now as opposed to 40% earlier) but that might have been just the earlier swap file change catching up since my stats graphs seem to show the CPU usage lowering before I rebooted ... But even memory usage is down since now it sits at around 75% as opposed to 85% earlier ...

Not sure if this was a result of PGTune or just restarting Postgres though 🙂 Guess I'll have to monitor for longer and see. But at this point, it's definitely usable and as long as things don't spike suddenly, I can stop monitoring and start working on other stuff — like why I can't switch the frontend theme to something other than pleroma-fe 😛

@deltatux Thanks for all the info and yes, this can get very addictive 😃 I used to do tinkering on my machines all the time but had kind of not done anything as long as they ran for a few years ... Now getting back into it is reminding me why I stopped in the first place 😛

I just discovered a section in the Akkoma docs about tuning Postgres performance (https://docs.akkoma.dev/stable/configuration/postgresql/) and that in turn pointed to PGTune (https://pgtune.leopard.in.ua/) .. So going to give those a try to see if that makes things better or worse.

Some of the settings suggested by PGTune are different to what I set up yesterday based on what I read online. So I'm curious as to if this makes things better or worse ... But generally, this is running fine enough at this point for my purposes. So I might keep it at that ...

Or, try to get a single 4G RAM VPS (depending on cost) and combine both my servers in one place. Trouble is finding the time for migrating all my sites since I have like 10 different WordPress blogs spread over three separate domains 🙂

@deltatux I have another VPS with 2G RAM and since this whole Akkoma thing was done mostly as a lets-see-where-I-can-go-with-this kind of thing, I'm reluctant to pay for another 2GB RAM VPS ... well, at DigitalOcean at least since it looks as if I can't get zRAM working here 😛

Thank you for reminding me about the Oracle Cloud Always Free Tier! I do have one of those but had got it mostly to try out machine learning stuff and then promptly forgot all about it ...I should check to see if I can use that. Maybe that would be the solution ... But I don't know if setting up Akkoma would be covered by their TOS? Guess I better get reading ...

After adding a swap file, this particular install seems to be pretty OK. Sure it does do a lot of swapping but then again, all that's running on this VPS is Akkoma 🙂 I did enable a few things originally like media proxying that I turned off when I discovered how much the server is struggling. So maybe I should try turning on a few things and see where it goes?

Looking at optimizing Postgres at the moment to see if that can help too, though I already did some tweaking there already ...

So many things to try 😛

@deltatux Glad it's helping (even if it's placebo effect) but the credit goes to @shinomoroll and I'm just passing on the info 🙂

I couldn't get it working on my VPS but it does look as if it should help. I guess I'll just have to be content with my swap making things work on my 1GB VPS since I didn't really want to switch over to another 2GB RAM VPS 😛

OK, time for an update on the state of the Akkoma server ... this is about the Akkoma server I set up, not the general state of Akkoma development 😛

After I set up Akkoma on a 1GB RAM VPS yesterday, I could see there were issues. I'd constantly see the Red "502 error" banner at the top of my Akkoma feed for example ... Plus, memory usage (and CPU) on the server was constantly pegged at 100%.

I read somewhere that the CPU usage might be a misleading stat since Akkoma (and Pleroma) uses "busy waiting" to fake out the OS into thinking it's busy when it's not. I don't know if this is what is happening or if the constant low RAM keeps the CPU busy, but either way, that's what I was seeing yesterday.

Somebody suggested that I should enable zRAM since they had good results with zRAM on a 1GB RAM server. So I thought I'd give it a go.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get zRAM enabled on my DigitalOcean VPS despite trying two separate guides on how to do so. Other info I read online seemed to indicate that this might be an issue that others had faced too. Is this DigitalOcean (or their VPS software) specific? I don't know. But I gave it a rest for the moment since I just didn't feel like struggling with it any longer.

I had noticed that my VPS didn't have a swap file set. While researching the zRAM stuff, I came across a DigitalOcean guide on setting up (and tweaking) a swap file for your VPS. I decided to try that and see if that would help ...

And all I can say is, "wow, it makes a huge difference!" 🙂

The CPU load which had been at about 80% - 90% most of the time went down to about 40%. While memory load didn't decrease as much, instead of being almost constantly at 100%, it's now down to about 95%. Best of all, I haven't seen a red "502" banner on my Akkoma feed since I added the swap file 🙂

So if you can add zRAM, it probably will help since it adds a compressed block in memory so that you can store more data in memory. But if you can't, and you don't have a swap enabled, do enable swapping since it makes a huge difference. Hopefully, this helps somebody 🙂

I talk a lot about my #writing but I also like to paint.

#art #artist #acrylic

@jdp23 Yeah, each to their own 🙂 I've been coding for 30+ years now and I continue to do it because I find it fun. But then again, it's mostly my own code that I have to wrestle with most of the time, so that might be why I find it fun ...

I do like figuring out why something went wrong and so that's fun too. But when it just consistently goes wrong but there's no way to figure out *why* or any way to fix it, then it stops being fun. That's what happened with trying to build Pleroma from source for me — I spent a whole day just trying to set up Erlang compiling up but the error messages were useless and not something you could easily do a Google search with. Then it just becomes annoying because you have this feeling that you should be able to fix it, but you can't 😛

@jdp23 😃 To me, computers are the perfect tool because they do *exactly* what you tell them to do. So when software goes wrong, it's the person who told them what to do (not you, but the programmer who coded it) who probably went wrong ... So the person you should hate (or understand) is probably the coder 🙂

When I'm not tired (or in a rush, or just annoyed generally ...) it is fun for me to try to figure out where things went wrong with the software. Did I misunderstand something? Or did the coder (or the person who wrote the documentation) assume something that I wasn't looking at the same way?

So for me, it really is fun ... at times 😛 But these days, it's mostly tearing what little hair I have left out and screaming at the void because it just won't work 😃

@jdp23 Software is so much fun, isn't it? 😛 It's especially fun these days with so many versions and docs floating around. One will say do this and it doesn't work. And another will say, "but this works for sure!" and yet, it doesn't ...

I'm running into something like that with zRAM at the moment. I tried the first guide I found which seemed fairly straightforward. But no joy. But I probably need to read a bit more. It being waaay early in the morning doesn't help 🙂

Three of my favorite classes will be online & asynchronous--meaning you can take them from anywhere, without time zone weirdness.

Starts Jan. 25
Eight Weeks, Eight Drafts (about revision)
https://bit.ly/8Weeks8Drafts

Starts Mar. 15
Evil and Empathy
(about characterization)
https://bit.ly/EvilEmp

Starts Mar. 15
Finding the Right Voice
(about POV) https://bit.ly/VoiceLoft

#Writing #WritingCommunity #revision #editing #villains #characterization #narration #POV #perspective

An #introduction

I'm a #journalist, critic and #information activist; founding editor of https://flaminghydra.com https://popula.com and https://thebrick.house

I care about #library rights, #literature, #writing, #culture, #journalism, #publishing, #cinema and #freedom

Some of my favorite writers are Tom #Stoppard, Etsu Sugimoto, Henry #Fielding, Philip #Pullman, Sei #Shōnagon, Sybille Bedford, Klaus #Theweleit, Roberto #Bolaño, Agatha #Christie, Ernest Becker, P.G. #Wodehouse