Hello all!

As a heads up, I’ve gone ahead and processed a rollout of Lemmy 0.18.1 which was just released.

Generally, for updates I like to create a maintenance window a couple of days ahead of time and communicate this, just in case something were to go wrong then no one is left in the dark as to what is happening - however, Lemmy 0.18.1 contains some very important performance and federation fixes so I felt it was best to just go ahead and upgrade ASAP.

Of course, the VM that this instance runs on is backed up automatically every day twice, and I always take a backup right before making any changes as well.

Backups are taken as snapshots of the whole VM, but snapshots can be a bit slow to restore due to the time it takes to pull the VM’s storage from my backups server (which is in the same datacenter but there are still other factors that impact the time it takes to read->stream/transmit->write the backup back onto the VM) so in the case of a restore being needed, performance would most likely experience some degradation and is also time that federated data would vanish (from the period that the restore was started to the time it ended). This is why the maintenance window for upgrades is always an hour at minimum.

Thankfully, from what I understand, 0.18.0 -> 0.18.1 didn’t result in too many major database changes, which is where the biggest chance for things to go wrong come from (due to database migrations not getting properly applied), but there were still some in general.

Anyways, enough rambling from me - we’re all set now, but as always if you happen to see anything go wrong, please don’t hesitate to let me know and I’ll personally be of course looking out as well (which is why I don’t do upgrades when I’m about to go to sleep!) through general usage and keeping an eye on the server logs (its amazing how fast they fly through given that every single federated action generates a new line).

I’ll keep this post pinned for a couple of days just as an easy way to report any potential problems.