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Stalin: We may take it as the rule that as long as the Bolsheviks maintain connection with the broad masses of the people they will be invincible. And, on the contrary, as soon as the Bolsheviks become severed from the masses and lose their connection with them, as soon as they become covered with bureaucratic rust, they will lose all their strength and become a mere squib. In the mythology of the ancient Greeks there is the celebrated hero Antaeus who, so the legend goes, was the son of Poseidon, god of the seas, and Gaea, goddess of the earth. Antaeus was particularly attached to his mother who gave birth to him, suckled him and reared him. There was not a hero whom this Antaeus did not vanquish. He was regarded as an invincible hero. Wherein lay his strength? It lay in the fact that every time he was hard pressed in the fight against his adversary he touched the earth, his mother, who gave birth to him and suckled him, and that gave him new strength. But he had a vulnerable spot - the danger of being detached from the earth in some way or other. His enemies took this into account and watched for it. One day an enemy appeared who took advantage of this vulnerable spot and vanquished Antaeus. This was Hercules. How did Hercules vanquish Antaeus? He lifted him off the ground, kept him suspended, prevented him from touching the ground and throttled him. I think that the Bolsheviks remind us of the hero of Greek mythology, Antaeus. They, like Antaeus, are strong because they maintain connection with their mother, the masses who gave birth to them, suckled them and reared them. And as long as they maintain connection with their mother, with the people, they have every chance of remaining invincible. This is the key to the invincibility of Bolshevik leadership. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Lenin: The progressive historical role of capitalism may be summed up in two brief propositions: increase in the productive forces of social labour, and the socialisation of that labour. But both these facts manifest themselves in extremely diverse processes in different branches of the national economy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


I DIDN'T NEED PIXIE AND BRUTUS TO MAKE ME CRY THIS MORNING!


Been (re-?)watching Babylon 5, and I think it holds up remarkably well with a good story.

I'm into Season 3 and it's only been really dated by the intro, CG quality, aspect ratio, and the use of CRTs.

(questionable "re" because I think I watched only a handful of episodes as a kid)



Random recommendation post:

Kagi: kagi.com
"Premium" Search Engine, free tier to try it out and a small monthly fee to use it regularly. Absolutely better results than Google, no ads, and more privacy. I really do recommend it. (And for my family there is a family plan as well...)

Beeper: beeper.com
A universal chat platform, if you long for the old days of Trillian, GAIM/Pidgin, and the like. Days when you could use your own chat program and just talk to everyone across everything... well this is it again. It's a Matrix service (think open source equivalent to Messenger/Skype/Discord/etc) and bridges to all the other services. Currently it's free, but it's planned to be free + paid extra features.

This has made a world of difference in my experience talking and chatting with people, especially the short list of people who talk primarily on Discord rather than SMS or Messenger. Plus if you're on Beeper or another Matrix service, end-to-end encryption is the default for complete security (You can even use your own client if you like without losing that)

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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)