I’ve noticed sometimes that comments and posts to communities on other instances take a very long time to show up on the main instance, sometimes never showing up. Like, I post something, and it shows up on beehaws copy. But, I go to the other instance to look, and I don’t see it (though sometimes it shows up a few hours later). I checked and our two instances were federated in each case I have noticed.
Anyone else notice this? Is this expected?
I’ve never run a Lemmy or kbin instance, but have run a mastodon instance and am familiar with distributed systems in general.
Probably both the source instance and the destination instance have a queue of federated messages to process and the message needs to be sent to the destination and processed into the destination database respectively before it’ll show up on the destination of the worker threads get overwhelmed.
I’d imagine that recently with the influx of users, activity, and the size of the federation, a number of instances probably sometimes have some pretty deep queues to work through at times.
Ten hours isn’t ideal and hopefully isn’t common, but doesn’t seem out of the question in the case of connectivity issues or spikes im activity.
That makes sense, and is understandable. I think in some cases messages might be getting lost entirely though; like, I have one post from 6 days ago that didn’t federate, for example.
I’ve noticed about a 10 minute catch-up time between beehaw and kbin.
I just had a 3 hr delay posting to a community on another instance and 4 posts haven’t gone through after 12 hrs to a different community on same instance. One comment missing also.
Looks fine on my end, nothing if I browse the instance directly.
Some had been in limbo for several hours, so I deleted and reposted one, and it showed up immediately. So I think sometimes things fail to send over, which is unfortunate. Hopefully some better checks get added in for that.
Actually, I noticed that someones reply to me hadn’t federated. I was able to force it by dropping the link into the search. So maybe, if you ever notice a post not going through, that can be a workaround. Still though, a fix would be better.