Running a Mastodon server is becoming increasingly problematic due to GenAI.
There’s multiple different things happening, including but not limited to:
- very aggressive scraping of user content and block evasion, with the resource costs that come with it
- AI agents aggressively trying to register accounts and evade restrictions
- rising cost of RAM - Mastodon is memory hungry, RAM is really expensive now
It’s odd to experience first hand, it’s like being consumed by.. a void.
Replying to @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
@GossiTheDog @WTL out of curiosity, which parts of mastodon are the most memory-hungry? E.g., async queue handlers vs serving the actual app
Replying to @kboyd@phpc.social
@kboyd the part where ruby doesn't have a modern async runtime, so you have to run multiple processes, each with multiple GIL-interlocked threads, holding multiple postgres connections, which are quite heavy
also from what I heard, background job processor can't run too many threads concurrently, so you have to run multiple copies of those, but I haven't retested that on modern versions
@kboyd elasticsearch is also quite heavy, and there's still no support for resource-efficient alternatives (which do exist)