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R. Palme Dutt: Fascism is thus a form of dictatorship of monopoly capital. It is a form appearing at a late stage in monopoly capitalist development, during the general crisis of capitalism, after the international working-class revolution has opened, when all the economic, social and political contradictions of capitalism have become extremely acute. It is a form characteristic of a high degree of monopoly capitalist concentration, and greatly accelerates further concentration. It is a form characteristic of an advanced stage of the class struggle, when the old Liberal (or, in the post-war form, Social Democratic) methods of deception of the workers and attempted conciliation of the class struggle no longer prove adequate for the maintenance of capitalist supremacy, and it becomes necessary for the capitalist dictatorship to proceed to open repressive measures and terrorist methods. Fascism promotes in the economic field the close fusion of the State machine with the banks and trusts. Corresponding to this narrowed economic dictatorship, Fascism re-moulds the forms of the State to reflect the open political domination of the ruling oligarchy, restricts the sphere of Parliament, and seeks to subject all forms of political expression and organisation to unified governmental control. To curb the class struggle, Fascism abolishes the right to strike, establishes state regulation of wages, prices and labour conditions, and replaces independent working-class organisation by the " corporate system" or "labour front," the joint organisation of the workers, employers and state representatives under the control of the dictatorship of monopoly capital. For propaganda purposes all these measures are covered up under social demagogy about the " new type of (German, British, French, etc.) socialism, social security," community of interests, national unity," " abolition of capitalist exploitation," restriction of profits," " replacement of the profit motive by social service," recognition of the rights of labour," etc.-all which is contrasted with the sinister disruptive aims of " Marxism " or " Communism," which is presented as the enemy underlying every form of opposition or independent expression. Corresponding to the expansionist imperialist aims of the dominant sections of monopoly capital, Fascism organises the entire society for war, and freely uses the mask of " national patriotism " (alongside " religion " and " spiritual regeneration") to conceal its aims, together with denunciations of ' 'treachery' against all opposing forces. All these characteristics of Fascism are characteristics of the open, violent dictatorship of the most powerful, reactionary, chauvinist sections of monopoly capital. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9642


Lenin: The opportunists are bourgeois enemies of the proletarian revolution, who in peaceful times carry on their bourgeois work in secret, concealing themselves within the workers’ parties, while in times of crisis they immediately prove to be open allies of the entire united bourgeoisie, from the conservative to the most radical and democratic part of the latter, from the free thinkers, to the religious and clerical sections. Anyone who has failed to understand this truth after the events we have gone through is hopelessly deceiving both himself and the workers. Individual desertions are inevitable under the present conditions, but their significance, it should be remembered, is determined by the existence of a section and current of petty-bourgeois opportunists. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9643


Kim Il Sung: As the forces of capital are international, so the liberation struggle of the peoples is an international movement. The revolutionary movements in individual countries are national movements, and constitute part of the world revolution at the same time. The revolutionary struggles of the peoples in all countries have the relationship of supporting and complementing each other and join together in one stream of world revolution. The revolution which has emerged victorious should assist the revolutions of those countries which are not yet triumphant with its experiences and examples and render active support to the liberation struggle of the world's peoples with its political, economic and military power, while the peoples in the countries which have not yet won the revolutions should struggle more actively to defend the victorious revolutions of other countries against the imperialist policy of strangulation and hasten victory for their own revolutions. This is the law of the development of the world revolutionary movement and the excellent tradition already formed in the course of the people's liberation struggle. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote9644


Short Planned Maintenance Tonight


My apologies if this is inconvenient, I opted to do it on shorter notice without a set hour because (a) there's not a lot of activity on the server and (b) I'm really impatient.

I'm doing a hardware upgrade that requires rebooting the network storage backend which will bring down everything for a short time. It should take well under 30 minutes to do the hardware swap and most of the downtime is just going to be the database starting back up (which often takes in the range of another 30 minutes).

As part of this I'll also be deploying some software updates that require a reboot to take effect.



WTF?


I honestly haven't the foggiest idea how this happened, but apparently the DNS settings got changed a few days ago on the servers with absolutely no explanation (and to junk nonsense settings for some reason). I'm going to keep an eye on them to make sure they don't change again.

Additionally I think that created a cascade that caused the other problems.

Any posts you've made over the past 2-3 days haven't been sent to other servers, but will start sending now.

As far as the other problems, I think when that happened it caused so many processes to lag and take way longer and more resources than usual as any time it tried to contact another server it timed out on the dns request.



DOS Overload


There's been some recent outages of the server, the root cause I've tracked down to the server getting overloaded with requests (mostly updates from other servers). Those updates have been coming in faster than the server can process them and preventing other requests from coming through.

I've made some tweaks that I believe have resolved it, fingers crossed.

Technical explanation:

The servers ran out of php-fpm threads to handle requests. It was configured with static count of 30 each (60 total). They were definitely impacted significantly by memory leaks which kept the count low.

I've changed it from static to ondemand and increased the count to 100 each, I'll probably go in and increase it again since it's still pegged at that limit almost constantly. But thankfully running on-demand seems to be keeping the memory usage per thread drastically lower.

Where the static assignment of 30 was eating up 8GB of ram, 100 on-demand threads is only taking up 1.3GB.

I'm going to increase it until it's either hitting memory constraints or it's no longer constantly at full capacity.

in reply to Server News

There's definitely some sort of time and code problem involved as it hit again this morning even with the previous changes, though this time it only impacted updates (making posts/comments/likes, getting new posts). I think reading was unaffected because those operations are faster and require significantly less memory.

For whatever reason, sometime around midnight the server gets hit with a bunch of requests that all seem to lock up, eating up large quantities of memory and then won't exit. (With on-demand the threads exit after 10s of being idle, there was over 100 threads running continuously from midnight until I killed them around 9am). Likewise there was a very massive flood of updates from other servers corresponding to that, so I think it might just be a bunch of large servers sending bulk updates or some such.

New tuning to handle that: I put firmer time limits into PHP to prevent threads from running forever, there's two options for setting max times and the first was getting ignored (I think friendica overrode it? the second should override that and kill any threads going too long)

In addition to that, I set up a rate limiter to the inbox endpoint (where other servers send updates to), this should help keep that from overloading the server (majority of the time it'll just be slowing them down by a second or two unless the server is overloaded, at which point the rate limit should help get it accessible for users)