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What happened to Vivaldi Social?

thomasp.vivaldi.net

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Re: What happened to Vivaldi Social?

#11

Post by Brendinooo »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #8

Hm, so a distributed twitter runs into the challenge that each independently managed node is ... and independently managed node. Backup problems etc. Centralized twitter improves its operations for all users over time. But can be purchased by a nutso billionaire on a whim, or subjected to the """"""national security"""""" directives of the US Government.

Yeah. Speaking in generalities, decentralization increases overall resilience of a network because it isolates the extent to which bad things can spread. Centralization increases efficiency (and efficacy, if the ruler of the centralized power is competent), and the likelihood of a system-wide failure.

Re: What happened to Vivaldi Social?

#12

Post by input_sh »

olah_1 wrote: post #9
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #8

Hm, so a distributed twitter runs into the challenge that each independently managed node is ... and independently managed node. Backup problems etc. Centralized twitter improves its operations for all users over time. But can be purchased by a nutso billionaire on a whim, or subjected to the """"""national security"""""" directives of the US Government.

Perhaps better is decentralized twitter (Nostr). Your account doesn't live on a server and you send events to multiple servers if you want to. If one server goes down, it hardly impacts you.

I'm sure all 30 of Nostr users will benefit.

Re: What happened to Vivaldi Social?

#13

Post by TheDong »

photoGrant wrote: post #4

Bad luck on timing? Feels like luck had little to do with it and migration testing wasn't fuzz'd enough?

Who are you suggesting fuzz what?

The bug wouldn't have occurred in a normal mastodon installation since mastodon's recommended configuration is a single postgres database, or at the very least to use synchronous replication.

Also, very typically, fuzzers intentionally use simplified configuration, so it seems even less likely fuzzing would have caught this interaction.

Re: What happened to Vivaldi Social?

#14

Post by rsynnott »

TheDong wrote: post #10
rsynnott wrote: post #3

Items two and three not happening atomically feels like an issue, though I assume there's a reason that it's not trivial to do so (I haven't looked at the code; really should at some point.)

One of the linked fixes is: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/commit/13ec425b721c9594... It seems like it was trivial to make it happen atomically. There just wasn't a need to before since them not being atomic isn't an issue, unless you have a poor configuration like someone pointing sidekiq at a stale database server (sorry, a replica), which I see as the primary issue here.

I think even without that there was likely still at least theoretically a race condition.

Re: What happened to Vivaldi Social?

#15

Post by rsynnott »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #8

Hm, so a distributed twitter runs into the challenge that each independently managed node is ... and independently managed node. Backup problems etc. Centralized twitter improves its operations for all users over time. But can be purchased by a nutso billionaire on a whim, or subjected to the """"""national security"""""" directives of the US Government.

Eh. Unusual configuration surfaced a bug, bug was fixed. That's just _normal_.

Re: What happened to Vivaldi Social?

#16

Post by empathy_m »

The part that resonates here is saying

"ah yes well we have a full database backup so we can do a full restore", then

"the full restore will be tough and involve downtime and has some side effects," then

"I bet we could be clever and restore only part of the data that are missing", then

doing that by hand, which hits weird errors, then

finally shipping the jury-rigged selective restore and cleaning up the last five missing pieces of data (hoping you didn't miss a sixth)

Happens every time someone practices backup/restore no matter how hard they've worked in advance. It always ends up being an application level thing to decide what data to put back from the backup image.

Re: What happened to Vivaldi Social?

#17

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

empathy_m wrote: post #16

The part that resonates here is saying "ah yes well we have a full database backup so we can do a full restore", then "the full restore will be tough and involve downtime and has some side effects," then "I bet we could be clever and restore only part of the data that are missing", then doing that by hand, which hits weird errors, then finally shipping the jury-rigged selective restore and cleaning up the last five m…

I agree with you. The phrase is you don’t have backups unless you test your backups.

But in this case I don’t really get what the issue is. Restore everything from the last good backup and people miss some posts made in the meantime, sucks, but it’s an instant solution instead of hand work and uncertainty.

Re: What happened to Vivaldi Social?

#18

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

TheDong wrote: post #7
TylerE wrote: post #5

This make anyone elses eyebrows raise sky high at this? > Claire replied, asking for the full stacktraces for the log entries, which I was able to also extract from the logs. This is either deep voodoo magic, or the code or configuration is turning a Xeon into the equivalent of a 286. House is that not, like, megabytes on every single hit?

> HTTP 500 errors when viewing an account > Stacktrace for that 500 This is the default ruby on rails behavior. It prints a stacktrace on any 500 or unknown error, and it's just line numbers and filepaths. > megabytes on every single hit I run a rails app that's very poorly designed. I just checked, and the stack trace for a single 500 is 5KiB. It doesn't even add up to 1MiB a day since there's only a 500 error about…

>Java's default exception behavior is to bubble up a stack trace with every exception, whether you print it or not,

Anyone who has spent 5 minutes in Java knows exactly what this looks like. And also how unwelcoming it is to new programmers.

Re: What happened to Vivaldi Social?

#19

Post by pornel »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #8

Hm, so a distributed twitter runs into the challenge that each independently managed node is ... and independently managed node. Backup problems etc. Centralized twitter improves its operations for all users over time. But can be purchased by a nutso billionaire on a whim, or subjected to the """"""national security"""""" directives of the US Government.

Database replicas are "distributed", but not in the sense ActivityPub is.

The same error could have happened on any centralized service that had more than one db instance and background cleanup jobs. I don't think Xitter runs entirely off Elon's laptop yet, so they could have had the same kind of error.

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