Developer of PieFed, a sibling of Lemmy & Mbin.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 4th, 2024

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  • We won’t 100% know the answer to that until we get there. But in 2025 fear of a lack of CPU cores is NOT what keeps me awake at night.

    Early performance results are positive. Check these links out:

    https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/13/technical-performance-of-each-fediverse-platform/

    https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/

    There are many many ways to ruin web app performance and choice of backend language is not really a big one. It’s what you do with it that counts.

    https://piefed.social is running on a low end VPS which costs $7.50 per month. Load average is about 1.45 during the busiest part of the day. Most of the load is caused by federating with lemmy.world and that won’t increase as more users come on board.

    PieFed is also really efficient with storage. After 16 months of operation, subscribed to every popular community, the piefed.social DB is 30 GB and the media storage is 28 GB. A Lemmy instance would be 10x that. I haven’t bothered to add S3 storage code because we just don’t need it (yet).

    Anyway, all this focus on costs and downsides is only half the coin. There are massive benefits that come from using Python:

    • Easy and fun
    • Fast development velocity
    • Huge amounts of developers know Python
    • Extensive and mature libraries with good documentation
    • Good readability
    • Cross-platform without re-compiling

    For a FOSS project where volunteer contributions from people play a big part these things are really important. There are many ways a project can fail (not just technical reasons but social & governance too) and running out of CPU is way way down on the list.