With all the talk about Europe’s digital sovereignty:
Yes, libravatar.org runs on AWS in the US - but it’s fully operated and managed from Europe 🇪🇺
It’s the world’s largest independent avatar hosting service, handling ~10M requests per day!
@libravatar.org
Any other troubles? Feel free to tag us or reach out to us: wiki.libravatar.org/talk_to_us/
Anyway, both issues should have been fixed now and response times for normal requests should be in the milliseconds area again. For some special avatar generators you may see still response times above a second, but most of them have been heavily optimized already.
After identifying this problem, we also identified that our SSL handshakes took way longer, because those optimizations where exhausted as well. Imagine, SSL handshake taking 7s...
So, there is a new website using our service with obviously massive accesses. Unfortunately, these request patterns are different than what we've optimized for and our caching didn't help. 2/x
Apologies people... I tend to dive into the technical problem instead of giving a heads up that something is going on... So here is the story: Since 3 days we're experiencing a massive increase in request volume. Yes, massive: 50% more! More in the thread...
And yes, my little AI gremlins have been great partners in crime. #VibeSysAdmin 😅
A few small hiccups in the past few days, but I promise it‘s for the best.
While the number of requests partially increased, we managed to increase the cache hit rate and decrease the CPU usage significantly!
And we getting closer to 200m!
Honestly, I wasn't expecting that much.
Yes, all Apache Requests that are served, not only avatar requests.
Around a week ago we migrated to the new infrastructure. Guess how many requests we've served since then?
Update. We had a few minor issues this morning... Funny SSL certificates we messed around during the migration... And automatic deployment of course wasn't adjusted...
Anyway, we should be back fully functional.
We encountered a few issues during the migration. Did we expect anything else? :-)
Anyway, main functionality should be working now. There's an issue with the BlueSky proxy that we need to investigate further, but that functionality is anyway still Beta.
Let us know if you encounter problems!
Folks... We know libravatar.org has been under heavy load recently and we relentlessly worked on getting this under control. The only way forward that we saw a few weeks ago is a new server. Good news: It's ready and we're in the middle of switching over the service. We'll keep you posted!
Happy birthday @libravatar.org !
While the original #Libravatar was created 15 years ago, the new version (code name ivatar) had it's first commit on the 7th of May 2018 - that's 7 years already! We missed the "May the 4th be with you." just by 3 days. :-)
Just one caveat here: It's not yet released to production. But if you're willing, you can try it out on the public development instance: dev.libravatar.org
Feedback is welcome, as always!
Love in the air. @libravatar.bsky.social ❤️ @bsky.app!
And we hope this love becomes mutual! That's why we've been working on an integration for the profile picture - maintain it on Bluesky, use it with every service supporting the Libravatar API!
Thanks @ofalk.bsky.social for the idea and code!
@libravatar.bsky.social loves @bsky.app ... More to come on that topic! Watch out!
We are here!
Yes, we ditched X as well. As many others. We're still on Mastodon of course, but Bluesky may become our preferred platform for announcements going forward.
