this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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I don't believe this is how it works though.
Let's say your tiny 3 person instance is connected to a big one. I believe it only pulls in content from the communities somebody from the small instance is subscribed too. Correct me if I'm wrong.
That's what they're saying.
Essentially - if someone from the small instance subscribes to a community that has a ton of data (huge post volume, images, whatever), the small instance needs to pull data over from the larger instance. At some point there may be communities that are so large small instances can't pull them in without tanking.
Could that be solved by caching? Can't the smaller instance avoid some duplication?
That's what I've gathered, but I don't believe there's a way for instance owners to limit what's fetched - a user crafts the query and the server does the needful.
I imagine this could amount to a denial of service attack of sorts, if some high-churn communities are imported into tiny instances. How bad that could be, I have no idea - I'm speaking pretty theoretically, here. Text is tiny, after all, so it's probably not much of a concern, since most of the media is actually handled elsewhere...
I'm not a web developer. I'm sort of a sysadmin so i have some experiences maintaining machines for web apps for other people. And you are right...text will not create massive amounts of data. But a lot of tiny transactions can bring down machines surprisingly fast even if the total amount of data is relatively small.
I guess we are here to experience it first hand. I don't think anybody...not even the developers have a clear idea of how well this will scale. There is only one way to find out lol