Lemmy Federation Architecture Change Proposal

HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.com to Technology@beehaw.org – 48 points – [Architecture] Hub-Spoke model for federation? · Issue #3245 · LemmyNet/lemmy
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https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3245

I posted far more details on the issue then I am putting here-

But, just to bring some math in- with the current full-mesh federation model, assuming 10,000 instances-

That will require nearly 50 million connections.

Each comment. Each vote. Each post, will have to be sent 50 million seperate times.

In the purposed hub-spoke model, We can reduce that by over 99%, so that each post/vote/comment/etc, only has to be sent 10,000 times (plus n*(n-1)/2 times, where n = number of hub servers).

The current full mesh architecture will not scale. I predict, exponential growth will continue to occur.

Let's work on a solution to this problem together.

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I believe the current implementation wont scale because instances won't be able to handle every subscribed federated action. Having a hub server doesn't reduce the number of subscribed federated actions, only whom they come from.

But- if we take that action of handling the federations, and seperate it from the main application server(Allowing the main instance server to focus on handling its local user-base), and architect it in a way that allows scaling the number of proxy servers up and down-

Would that not sound like a big improvement to scalability?

The node still needs to receive every subscribed federated action and insert it into the local database. This has to be local to the "main application server". Your proxy servers don't reduce the number of federated actions. It only reduces the number of servers needed to communicate with.

I feel that the bottleneck will be the total number of federated actions, not which servers deliver them.