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.

@GossiTheDog @WTL out of curiosity, which parts of mastodon are the most memory-hungry? E.g., async queue handlers vs serving the actual app

@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

@GossiTheDog @WTL

@mo @GossiTheDog @WTL Ah, so I wouldn't gain very much from rewriting it in PHP. Except for a newfound appreciation of headache medication.

(tbh I'm using PHP in this example because it's my favourite language, but this headache problem would even be true for rust or go)