Version 0.19.X Deployment
Hello world!
I’m sure many of you fine folks have been wondering why we have not upgraded to version 0.19.X yet.
The whole team here has been getting asked this question quite a bit, from both members of the community and other instance admins. We want everyone to know, YES, we will upgrade to version 0.19.
We do not have a hard date set for when we will be upgrading as of yet, as we have about 7 associated task items that go along with this upgrade for things we need to double-check and confirm there will be no breakage.
Another big reason why we have not upgraded is due to reports from other instance admins that the front-end GUI can have performance issues. While a large portion of folks access our site using apps on their phones, we would rather not degrade the user experience for the rest of everyone else.
Worst case in terms of UI slowness, we would ask everyone to use either Alexandrite () or Photon () to mitigate the potential performance issues.
One final point to mention to address the delay is that we usually wait 1-2 weeks after a new release before applying it to production. This was complicated by the fact that there were multiple releases right after each other, with each new release having issues we hoped would be patched in the NEXT version. A new version would come up, and we would have to evaluate the stability and performance of it, which would take about 2 weeks, and then ANOTHER version would come out, which we would need to test. This was further complicated by the fact this was during the holiday season.
| Version | Release Date |
|---|---|
| 0.19.0 | 2023-12-15 |
| 0.19.1 | 2023-12-20 |
| 0.19.2 | 2024-01-10 |
| 0.19.3 | 2024-01-24 |
For us, stability is paramount, as we care very much about keeping everyone happy here.
While we can appreciate the rapid release of patches on 0.19, I hope everyone can now understand the delay. If all goes well, we will set a release day in the next week or two, most likely on a Saturday around 1800 UTC.
-jelloeater85
Speaking as someone who is on an instance (lemmy.today) that ran into a bunch of breakage from the 0.19.X releases, and which still isn’t fully resolved, and where the instance admin said that he wished that he could downgrade to 0.18.X but couldn’t due to schema changes, I strongly endorse a conservative approach. The releases have not really met the bar that one might want for stability.
That’s especially true for lemmy.world, since it hosts a large chunk of the Fediverse communities, and if it has serious problems, there are gonna be spillover effects even on users elsewhere. I’d wait until less-critical instances have been the guinea pig for a bit on releases.
Seriously. Less is more.
There’s no need to keep up with the meme of releasing updates as quickly as possible.
Well said. I will happily forgo some new features for a while if it means that the overall experience is more consistent.
I just love how professional the Lemmy instances have become. They went from having stability issues to being extremely stable. I love our Lemmy community.
Keep up the good work!
I just love how professional the Lemmy instances have become.
Too bad upstream Lemmy development didn’t adapt. The early 0.19 releases left several big instances hanging with severe bugs leaving them practically unusable.
In the developers defense, there are some bugs that don’t appear until a a certain workload threshold is crossed. It’s entirely possible for code to pass all tests and yet break when under heavy load in the real world (which can be difficult to simulate).
Yeah many bugs are difficult to catch, but the federation and timestamp issue, was something different and almost like a joke that got out of hand.
the federation and timestamp issue, was something different and almost like a joke that got out of hand.
YOLO-driven development
The testing in production development
Everyone has a test enviroment, some are lucky to have a separate production enviroment
The testing in production development
That’s what Mastodon developers seem to do but ahead of formally releasing new versions and on their own instance only:
Lemmy devs have pushed RCs to lemmy.ml in the past.
Thank you for looking out for us mobile/desktop web browser peasants. ❤️
Hey ever since the update boost won’t show my subscriptions and my post/comment history, I can only browse in all
Is this a known issue that I should bring up with the boost people?
Edit: I logged in to the wrong instance lol
Edit: I logged in to the wrong instance lol
That’ll do it.
Literally what we as admins feel like.
“Now it’s gonna take longer because you asked”
Correct
Hey just FYI, I’ve been experiencing a postgres memory leak issue on my instance since the upgrade to 0.19.2. Theres a GitHub issue open about it (#4406), not sure if it’s something that will affect you but probably worth keeping in mind
Hi,
thanks for the tip, we will look into this issue and check if it affects anything on our scale.
Yeah no problem, checked the issue – looks like there’s some movement on it so we’ll see
We are investigating another possible bug, that sorta spams other instances full of requests ( we say 5k requests per 5 seconds ) kinda like a DOS attack. We only saw this phenomena on 0.19.3 instances, and they are hitting us currently hard with many requests. We will have to block them until it gets fixed on their side.
Hmmmm interesting, i hope im not on the ban list! I haven’t noticed any weird traffic like that
Nope you are not ;)
We noticed it that it happens on smaller instances, that probably doesnt have the perfect hardware to run the 0.19 version and crashes => retries federation and they probably dont have a backoff strategy.
Because we noticed the site the domain was leading too wasnt responsive half of the time we tried to look if we can contact the admin.
LETSGO
Yeah my instance is small but my uptime is pretty good (except this db issue tbh) so that might be why
I’ve talked a lot of shit about the whole fediverse before, but I appreciate your stance towards stability. It’s what users crave! Thank you!
Leave the Gatorade for the plants…
0.19 breaks jerboa and idk if/ when that is getting updated
@dessalines@lemmy.ml released v0.0.51 in mid December, but I think it only reached Google Play on Dec 18th. I’m not sure when/if it was pushed up to f-Droid.
There are some minor issues, but largely it works fine for me on instances running 0.19
That’s weird I’ve gotten no notification there was an update out
Did you install from Google Play?
Open the Play Store link on your phone - the automatic update process has been thoroughly broken for at least a year.
If you installed from f-Droid I have no clue - I use stock android without any alternate stores set up.
Play store updates being broken would make sense. I don’t think I’ve had a single app updated automatically in that time frame… Holy shit lol
Thanks for all this info, I knew running the largest Lemmy instance would be challenging in term of version upgrade, and I’m happy you keep us posted on all your plans! Keep up the good work!
Yeah, I think the transparency and inclusivity of this instance serves as a model. I love knowing that places like this can exist.
Thank you!
You’re welcome, and thank you too! 😊
No, YOU are welcome here ;) You guys make this instance and the fediverse the best ;D
Thanks for the update. I appreciate the transparency and honesty.
No pressure from me, I know all too well about upgrading to the newest version and finding out it has a showstopper bug for the features i was planning to use.
Thankyou for running the server and helping build the community and fediverse.
Lebowski.Social has also held back with the 0.19 upgrade. We are monitoring lemmy.world for now and will make our upgrade after that most likely.
no rush. most don’t notice minor changes. thanks
Thank you for all your hard work!
I for one am thankful for the admins’ continued dedication to platform stability.
Slow and steady wins the race
