State of the Instance (November 2022)
Sorry for another delay. I've actually done something in October, but the end of the month got here sooner than I expected and then I couldn't dedicate much time to writing this. Now it makes sense to just cover both October and November at once.
Closing of registrations
Since there's lots of press about Mastodon these days, we've had an influx of new users. This was probably one of the things that dramatically impacted performance (and made the instance throw lots of errors). Because of this, four days ago, I closed registrations. The situation is stable now so I'm reopening them today, but I'll probably resort to this more often.
Reclaiming space
Moving the monitoring dashboard
The dashboard was originally running on our old server until I provisioned the new one in 2020 and moved it there along with the instance. Using the same server for monitoring isn't probably the wisest thing to do, partially because the monitoring data takes up some space on its own. So, a month ago, I moved the monitoring application back to the old server and set it up in a way that it just grabs data from the main server and stores it on the old. Along with removing packages that were not needed anymore, this freed up a few GB.
In the process, I overhauled the dashboard a little, so it can now monitor multiple servers. The graphs also look a bit better, not that you'll see them often.
Purging old posts
Since we're running out of space, I'm going to start deleting very old posts, starting with those older than 2 years. There's a massive amount of posts which are rarely seen anymore and won't be missed. No posts of Cawfee Club users will be affected by this, only cached posts from other instances.
I'm still thinking of ways to do this sensibly, e.g. to keep posts if any of our local users were present in the thread, but if the instances are still alive, nothing will really be lost. (If you want me to preserve posts from specific users from dead instances, e.g. cvcvcv, just let me know.)
This will probably result in hours, maybe days of downtime. I'll let you know at least a week in advance through the admin account.
Operating costs
| Operating costs for September 2022 | |
|---|---|
| cawfee.club (server) | $30.00 USD |
| cawfee.club (block storage) | $1.25 USD |
| old.cawfee.club (server) | $3.50 USD |
| 000.testing.cawfee.club (server) * | $3.15 USD |
| Total | $37.90 USD |
| Operating costs for October 2022 | |
|---|---|
| cawfee.club (server) | $30.00 USD |
| cawfee.club (block storage) | $1.25 USD |
| old.cawfee.club (server) | $3.50 USD |
| 000.testing.cawfee.club (server) | $3.50 USD |
| Total | $38.25 USD |
* Billed from 2022-09-04.
old.cawfee.club found a new use for stats as mentioned above. 000.testing.cawfee.club was mentioned in the September update and I'm keeping it up for now. It was useful for testing some config options and it will be useful for test runs of old post purges.
New emoji
There's quite a bunch this time.
