Leaving the Basement
I would like to understand why Mastodon requires such a huge amount of hardware for mediocre traffic volumes. Not just the lazy &quot;it&#x27;s Rails&quot; answer - I know Rails is a resource hog, but that doesn&#x27;t go far enough to explain the extreme requirements here.<p>As a point of reference, look at what Stack Overflow is run on. As a caveat, SO is probably more read-heavy than Mastodon, but it also serves several orders of magnitude more volume (on a normal day in 2016 they would serve 209,420,973 HTTP requests[0]). They did this on 4 DB servers and 11 web servers. And in fact, it can (and has) worked serving this volume of traffic on only a single server.<p>With this setup SO was not even close to maxing out their hardware (servers were under 10% load, approximately). SO also listed their server hardware[1] in 2016. I don&#x27;t know enough about server hardware to assess the difference, but to my eye they look similar on the web tier with similar amounts of memory, similar disk, etc.<p>I&#x27;m not saying Hachyderm is doing anything wrong, but it makes me wonder if there&#x27;s a fundamental problem with the design of Mastodon. And to be clear I understand that this particular issue was caused by a disk failure, but that they even had this hardware in place running Hachyderm is surprising to me.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nickcraver.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;17&#x2F;stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nickcraver.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;17&#x2F;stack-overflow-the-ar...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nickcraver.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;29&#x2F;stack-overflow-the-hardware-2016-edition&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nickcraver.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;29&#x2F;stack-overflow-the-ha...</a>