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[Done] Pictrs Migration- Between NOW and 1700 UTC Image Upload Disabled (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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Hi all, We will be attempting to migrate Pict-rs tomorrow starting at 1700 UTC. Between now and 1700, image uploads will be disabled to try and avoid any data loss. You will still be able to like, comment and post until then. During the upgrade window, Pict-rs will be offline, so viewing images might not work. In theory CloudFlares CDN cache should cover us during the window, but YMMV. Hopefully everything should go smooth, but we do our best to make sure we have backups!

You can monitor our site health at https://dash.lemmy.world and https://status.lemmy.world

We will post updates to https://mastodon.world/@LemmyWorld as well.

Cheers, LW Infra Team 💗

Update This change is done. Images are now hosted on S3 storage and uploads are re-enabled.

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[-] MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 82 points 11 months ago

Love your work in managing Lemmy's infrastructure at scale. Would like to join you sometime

[-] jelloeater85@lemmy.world 20 points 11 months ago

Feel free to apply https://team.lemmy.world 🤓

[-] AlpacaChariot@lemmy.world 53 points 11 months ago

Love how openly you guys communicate about the management of LW. It's interesting for anyone with an interest in self hosting things to see how you've scaled up. Keep up the good work!

[-] jelloeater85@lemmy.world 16 points 11 months ago

Thanks so much 💗

[-] nix@merv.news 31 points 11 months ago

Is this migrating from pict-rs to object storage or upgrading pict-ra from 0.4 to 0.5?

[-] jelloeater85@lemmy.world 34 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Object storage. Sorry if that was unclear ❤️

[-] nix@merv.news 10 points 11 months ago

Ah nice congrats on the move

[-] jelloeater85@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

Thanks! It's a lot of work for the behind the scenes stuff, but we have a great team that really cares 👼

[-] rezz@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Where can I read more about why this is happening?

[-] ruud@lemmy.world 17 points 11 months ago

Actually 2 reasons why. First and most important, this was needed so we can use tooling to detect and remove CSAM material. Secondly, it's because this is more cheap and scalable than having it on disk.

[-] Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago

Thank you for doing what you do.

I've heard that being a content moderator is absolutely soul-crushing work. Here's hoping the new tooling lets you automate away the worst of it.

[-] misterbassman@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

I have no insight into why it's being done in this instance, but object storage is typically used when you want to move away from storing things on your web server with "fixed" storage, and instead store it in an "infinitely" expandable storage system. It is also much easier to manage when you have multiple servers as it's separate and shared.

[-] rezz@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Right on. This seems relatively important considering pict-rs is the lemmy default. Seems like a change that should be considered for the core repo.

[-] countvon@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago

The problem with making S3 config the default is that it would add friction for new admins. If you're just starting to play around with self-hosting Lemmy then it's 100% certain you have a local disk but not nearly as likely that you've got an S3 bucket ready to go. Making S3 the default would force those new admins to either tweak their configs or figure out how to get an S3 bucket before they could get going. Using local disk for images is fine for smaller instances and self-hosts, but for cost and scaling reasons having an option to switch to S3 is really valuable for larger instance like lemmy.world. Only the top 10-20% of instances are likely to really need to make the switch to S3, so Pictrs defaulting to local disk makes sense I think.

[-] magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh 5 points 11 months ago

While I agree on the technical aspects, I'll say that small instances benefit a lot from s3. My single user instance currently has over 25 Gb of media cache... Object storage (hosted on my NAS ) has been a godsend.

[-] jelloeater85@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Have you used MinoIO? I've used that before for local S3 and it works quite well.

[-] magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh 2 points 11 months ago

This is actually what I use. Great piece of software!

[-] jelloeater85@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

Yeah, it's dope.

[-] magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh 2 points 11 months ago

And surprisingly light on resources (apart from storage space obviously).

[-] ripcord@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

What kind, or host?

[-] jelloeater85@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

That we moved to S3 from filesystem

[-] ripcord@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

Right, but you said not AWS so I'm curious what either cloud-based S3 service, or baremetal appliance / stack you're using with S3.

[-] mrPickles@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

Curious as well. Could be Cloudflare R2 since they said they're using Cloudflare elsewhere, and it has zero egress fees. Or something like Minio. Obviously just wild speculation on my part.

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[-] RickRussell_CA@lemmy.world 30 points 11 months ago

I saw "Pictrs Migration" and I thought was about to open a map porn post regarding the movement of ancient Scots.

[-] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 15 points 11 months ago

Guyz, what is Pictr? Is it like Imgur?

Also, [excellent]

[-] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago

Kind of like Imgur, it's a barebones Image hosting server which is what Lemmy uses to serve images uploaded to the instance. It makes it easier otherwise people would need to use things like catbox or imgur itself to host images.

I do feel like support could be better with it though, like if it gave us an interface where we could access our images from our account, or at the very least one for admins.