Update The upgrade was done, DB migrations took around 5 minutes. We’ll keep an eye out for (new) issues but for now it seems to be OK.
Original message We will upgrade lemmy.world to 0.18.3 today at 20:00 UTC+2 (Check what this isn in your timezone). Expect the site to be down for a few minutes. ““Edit”” I was warned it could be more than a few minutes. The database update might even take 30 minutes or longer.
Release notes for 0.18.3 can be found here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/RELEASES.md
(This is unrelated to the downtimes we experienced lately, those are caused by attacks that we’re still looking into mitigating. Sorry for those)
Not really, you’d be surprised how often systems are bloated all because of a single option, character, etc. Most developers don’t start optimizing until much later in the software’s lifecycle. Often enough, it is easily overlooked. That’s why code reviews are needed often with fresh pair of eyes.
Just to set the expectations, reducing database size or CPU usage does not necessarily mean it is faster but it does mean there’s more free capacity on the servers to handle more users at the same performance.
More importantly; they may help reduce costs on the smaller indie instances that doesn’t need to buy larger server instances.
Hopefully, we’ll continue to see more of these optimizations.