sunny.garden July review :blobclipboard:
Mastodon Updates · Server Upgrade · Out Of Memory Incident · Hosting Costs and Donations
Cover by @Hester
https://hub.sunny.garden/2026/08/06/the-sunny-gardener-july-2026/
It was relatively cool, sunny, and breezy yesterday so I took the opportunity to go check out the lotus pond in Ueno park.
"... an upper stage (section) of a rocket used for a lunar mission will hit the moon. This may be of some (probably minor) scientific interest, and we may learn some things from it."
https://www.projectpluto.com/25010d.htm
A page made by a person about a niche topic they know things about. Top tier internet content.
Very pleasant clouds at sunset tonight, which I bring to you at great personal risk (of mosquito bites).
Airplane for scale.
Dear #MastoAdmin for anyone using #S3 storage I would highly recommend disabling S3 multipart uploads for a day (or forever) to see if you notice any improvements.
Pre-existing issues with Mastodon and S3, plus some recent regressions in the #AWS S3 library can cause a variety of issues, notably in the ingress #sidekiq worker, such as:
- infinite disk usage in /tmp
- higher outbound bandwidth use (2-4x)
- higher cpu and memory use by sidekiq
- higher costs on providers like Wasabi that have minimum duration charges for incomplete multipart uploads
You can do this by setting S3_MULTIPART_THRESHOLD=1073741824 (any sufficiently high value that all processed media will fit below).
Note that setting S3_FORCE_SINGLE_REQUEST=true is not sufficient, as this only impacts reading files from S3 to disk, and not uploading to S3. Increasing S3 timeouts and retries may help, but doesn't solve the issues entirely.
The results will depend on your environment and specific S3 provider, but are significant and worth testing to see if they affect you.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/39863
It's cool that Microsoft open sourced Comic Chat but I open sourced my IRC client 13 years ago http://pocketirc.com
Download today for all your Windows Mobile Pocket PC, Pocket PC 2002, and Pocket PC 2003 devices.
Hey #MastoAdmin is anyone else seeing an unusual spike in disk and/or memory usage over the past 12 hours?
Considerable increase in RAM use by sidekiq, the ingress queue in particular if you have them separated out?
Modest but notable increase in network activity over that same time?
I'm seeing this on two separate servers, similar configs but different versions of Debian, one a recent fresh install which has /tmp configured as a RAM disk by default, which is why I noticed when suddenly 50% more of my RAM was allocated than a few hours ago.
Restarting ingress sidekiq workers does free things up. Ingress queue has had slow gradual memory leak issues in the past, but this seems different.
At the park yesterday I was going to hang my bag on the corner of this sign for minute, but it was already being used.
sunny.garden maintenance has completed and we're back online :eariz_bun_cool:
Web users may need to refresh the page.
The search index is still rebuilding which may take another couple of hours, so full text search results will be incomplete until that finishes.
Other than that, please let me know if anything seems broken or notably worse now than it was yesterday.
Maintenance for sunny.garden will begin in about 15 minutes and the server is expected to be offline for 1-2 hours. :yell:
Scheduled Maintenance for sunny.garden :blobcatspace:
I plan on taking sunny.garden offline for 1-2 hours tomorrow, for hardware and software updates, starting at approximately:
PDT 22:00 Sunday, July 12
UTC 05:00 Monday, July 13
JST 14:00 Monday, July 13
In the event there are any issues resulting in extended downtime, updates will be posted on https://hub.sunny.garden/
In your opinion/expectation as a user, how long should a Mastodon/fedi server store posts from remote users that nobody on your local server has interacted with? (replied, starred, boosted, bookmarked, etc.)
Unlike many places, Tokyo has been having one of the coolest rainy seasons (between spring and summer) in recent years. Almost a week into July and we haven't had to turn on the AC yet. That will probably change finally in a couple of days.
On the downside, there have only been a few days with blue sky in the past month... so much grey...
sunny.garden June review :blobclipboard:
Mastodon Updates · Bots · Hosting Costs and Donations
Cover by @Bearina
https://hub.sunny.garden/2026/07/05/the-sunny-gardener-june-2026/
They haven't been very active here since they signed up last year, but @theinnersight just released a new album, so go give that or their other stuff a listen :blobmaracas:
https://theinnersight.bandcamp.com/album/fragments-of-memory
Sometimes I think the lesson we should take away from Ea-nasir is that anyone who is at all into ceramics should spend some amount of time making tablets, mugs, plates, whatever, and inscribing messages for the future on them...
"Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is a petulant vindictive man-baby."
"Capitalists are burning the world for profit while our incompetent leaders do nothing."
Doesn't even matter much what you do with them, keep them in a box, give them as gifts, throw them in rivers. But in 3000 years, a few them of them will be found, and humanity will know.
sunny.garden has been updated to Mastodon v4.6 :eariz_bun_cool:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/06/mastodon-4.6/
- Collections are a new thing that exist: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/04/designing-collections/
- It's now possible to add alt-text to profile and header images, instead of writing them in your bio.
- Alt text length limit for media attachments increased to 10,000 characters.
- You can now import and export your filters.
Web users may want to refresh the page to make sure the new version is loaded.
Psst, hey kid... want some [social media]?
