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Friendica extremely slow since update to 2020.09 and 2020.09.1


At the beginning of this week I updated to 2020.09, and since then Friendica has run very slowly. When I reboot the VPS, it runs very fast for a short while, and then gets bogged down again. I use Plesk to monitor the VPS, which is only running Friendica, and almost the entire 4 GiB of memory is constantly in use. I can also see that the "Apache & PFP-FPM" memory usage is at 792 MiB, which I believe is high.

However, I cannot figure out why this is occurring and see no apparent errors in the logs. But also because I have had no errors in the 6 months I've been running Friendica, I don't know exactly what is "normal." Any assistance troubleshooting this would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much for the replies. I saw a post from Steffen from 5 days ago, and now have changed my settings to match those (pasted again below). This is helping! Something must have changed in 2020.09, the default settings had always been fine up before. I will post again in the next day to confirm if the issue has been entirely resolved 😀

PHP-FPM pool:
pm = dynamic
pm.max_children = 275
pm.start_servers = 24
pm.min_spare_servers = 6
pm.max_spare_servers = 42
pm.max_requests = 1250

@Matt Panhans I experience a similar increase in load. Especially I/O load. It started with/after the 2020.09 release when I remember correctly. But I'm not sure yet what exactly is causing this.

@Matt Panhans Please be careful with my settings. They're good for my machine with 64GB RAM. But they can be too high for a smaller sever. Also, with 275 max. FPM processes you need at least 350 possible DB connections or you will get problems/errors.

Thank you this is helpful. Does anyone have a suggestion on appropriate PHP-FPM setting for a small VPS (~4GB memory) running only Friendica?
@Matt Panhans Wait... I have a second server. It's a VPS. I'll have a look...
@Matt Panhans
These are my settings for the Friendica forum node (VPS):
pm.max_children = 60                                               pm.start_servers = 10                                             pm.min_spare_servers = 4                                           pm.max_spare_servers = 16
Wonderful. Last question- it looks like you do not specify the pm.max_requests here then? I will try these values out and see how it goes!
What is extremely slow at the moment is selecting a link to a post/comment from the notifications bell dropdown menu. It takes up to 30 seconds until the page is loaded.

My issue appears to be resolve! I want to give a huge thank you to everyone for such prompt and helpful replies. I get better support here than I do from the IT department at my workplace!

My last thought on this issue - and I will leave to someone more technical to make this determination - is that it seems to me that there was an increase in Friendica's required resources/memory when moving from 2020.07 to 2020.09 that caused this issue. That's fine if expected, but if not it might be worth trying to understand the cause better, and perhaps get back to lower requirements. But I will leave to those more knowledgeable whether it's worth opening this as an issue on github.

@Adam Disable the trending tags if they're active. The trending tags are a performance killer on the community pages.
@Adam
Just letting you know from my end it's working really well / quickly now, I definitely noticed the previous lag. Thanks 😀

@Matt Panhans
I noticed a marked increase in load times and slowness after update to .09 as well
Tweaked the FPM as suggested, made tiny difference.

Then I remembered the RELAYS

Am I correct that there is now a new/better relay function in FRND? As in: it's working properly where it wasn't before and possibly there are now many more requests and connections to federating instances?

I had added 3 ~ 4 extra relays to feed /community/global with more content, when I removed them again, the load times seemed to normalise.

The more relay servers you add, the more incoming connections you get. But I don't think that this is the reason for this specific issue. We already discovered some "ping pong" problem when two servers are requesting each others system account very often. This is already changed in the develop branch.

Just to report back. Since the update to 2021.01 I don't have to restart php constantly any more. #Friendica is faster and makes more fun than ever.

Thanks to all the developers and contributors.

@Matt Panhans There was a big database structure update and a lot people reported while the task was running, that friendica was very slow. It can happend, that this task is running for a long time. Just let it run and see in the support forum for the threads about it.