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2.5 Admins
2.5 Admins 194: Thundering Mastodon
May 9, 2024
Discussing the impact of Mastodon's link previews on web servers, securing Windows DNS, drawbacks of write-once backup media, and optimizing Microsoft SQL Server with SSDs and ZFS for performance.
30:14
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Quick takeaways
- Mastodon's preview generation causing DDoS-like effects highlights the need for improving activity pub protocol for better traffic management.
- Federated platforms like Mastodon face challenges in preview caching, leading to increased server load and questions about balancing network resilience and individual load handling.
Deep dives
Issues with Preview Caching and Traffic Spikes
The podcast highlighted the issue of sites getting effectively de-dos'd due to how previews are generated on platforms like Mastodon. When users share links on Mastodon, every follower's instance generates its preview, causing a surge in traffic. While this traffic may not be as heavy as actual site visits, clustering requests in a short time span can overwhelm websites. Instances accessing previews separately lead to increased load, highlighting a need for activity pub protocol improvements to manage traffic distribution.
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