Unsolicited opinion: If #Mastodon wants to be a part of the #Fediverse that encourages small #selfhosted instances to be part of the whole, then it has to be a lean system able to be installed on second-hand/hand-me-down hardware and it should run reas...

Cadu Silva :v_blue:

@chris absolutely!

People interested in running their own instance should instead look to GoToSocial, Akkoma, Snac2, some Misskey fork or Hollo.

All of those serves the purpose of single or multi-user instance and can even be run in an old Raspberry Pi with only 512 MB of RAM (GoToSocial with sqlite as database).

I don't think Mastodon will ever be lightweight because of its inner gears and additional software (ElasticSearch et al.).

Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸

@cadusilva if perhaps one day there is the ability to move one's posts/history over then people will find their preferred platform that suits their situation more closely.

Renaud Chaput

@chris @sheogorath This is part of why we are working on https://www.fediscovery.org
Ideally, once this is done, you could run your instance without ElasticSearch and get very good search results (even better than with ES).
You can not have a fully distributed system, with all features that modern social media has, while not using a lot of resources.

Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸

@renchap @sheogorath I had not heard of fediscovery.org! A good solution!

iobear

@jerome @chris At the company I work for, we are switching to Grafana Loki for the same reason, it is way easier to host (non java) and it also have lower hardware requirements.

Edwin G. :mapleleafroundel:

@chris I spent a couple of days without ElasticSearch… it was horrible for searching my own posts.

Now, I will have a look at OpenSearch (?). It might fit my purpose better than ES.

[email protected]

IRC, or XMPP at worst, should be the gold standard to follow here. Those things can be installed on Pentium IVs that you can get from rural school trash yards, and still run reasonably well.

Jérôme

@EdwinG @chris it's a fork of ElasticSearch, it's unlikely to make a big difference. It was mostly a licensing dispute.

SomethingGeneric

@chris id argue it should also try its best to become single exec, so ir can be OS/distro agnostic too, but that's a major PITA

Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸

@SomethingGeneric a long term but very worthy goal!

Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸

@EdwinG yes I saw mention of it in the last release notes. I will be interested in your experience!

Sean Boyer 🇵🇸 FREE PALESTINE

@chris @EdwinG
I switched to opensearch from es and there was no appreciable difference to the memory it will consume. It's the same thing different license basically.

Ed Wiebe

@jerome @chris Java is used for portability, not performance. There are lots of things that would be much better. So many 'database' and 'indexing' things are done really badly with tools that aren't 'database' and 'indexing' tools. However, I am not in charge and happy not to be.

Philipp Krenn

@chris
1. not sure you're seen it already, but if you have docker you can just run "curl -fsSL https://elastic.co/start-local | sh" to get going (https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/run-elasticsearch-locally.html#local-dev-quick-start)
2. while elasticsearch won't be tiny, the most common problem is that people don't configure the heap size and then elasticsearch assumes that it should own the entire machine. will depend on your activity and the initial data import but 1GB should get you going.
I'd also say that some of the java dislike is a bit dated at this point

Philipp Krenn

@jerome @EdwinG @chris I'm clearly biased here but we'd say that it's rather the opposite: https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-opensearch-performance-gap

Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸

@xeraa thanks! I’m running a strait install on Debian. Can you point to some configuration options for the Heap size?

Jérôme

@xeraa @EdwinG @chris haha yeah I did some research yesterday and indeed the performance seems to be on the elastic side.

Always happy to see some elastic engineers over here!

Philipp Krenn

@chris yes: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/advanced-configuration.html
1. create a file in /etc/elasticsearch/jvm.options.d/ with the custom config (this will survive upgrades; don't change the jvm.options file directly)
2. try something like 700m as a starting point. you might be able to go a bit lower. or with more activity you might need to go higher. there are details on the setting page for Xmx + Xms — this is what you want

Philipp Krenn

@jerome @EdwinG @chris now I'm interested. anything you can share?

and it's great here. always happy to jump into some discussions!

Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸

@xeraa @jerome @EdwinG this is really wonderful that you're here Philipp. Your advice is really interesting and opposite to what I've seen elsewhere. My old iMac (2008) has 16GB of RAM, I had been told previously to look at allocating 25-50% of the RAM to Java which translates to a mammoth 8GB. I'm going to try cutting it right down to 1GB and see what happens.
What are some metrics or tools I can use to determine if the RAM it is using is suitable?