Federation is one of the areas I'm most interested in. While it may have some advantages for scaling, I suspect that the bigger benefit will be that people will be able to set up their own niche specific sites which interoperate with other sites.
There are currently over thirty different laconi.ca sites listed on http://laconi.ca/Main/ListOfServers I've tested federation with a few of them. One site, Sportstwit, is a good illustration of a niche server that federates with other servers. To get an example of how federation works, check out my profile on my site http://micro.orient-lodge.com/ahynes1 I'm currently subscribed to eight different users, three of them are over on the identi.ca server. How do you do this? It is a simple remote subscription. Find a person on a server that you are not currently logged onto. Click on subscribe and put in your profile on a different server. e.g. If I want to subscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED] from my identi.ca account, I go identi.ca and log in. I note that my profile there is http://identi.ca/ahynes1 Then, I go to http://micro.orient-lodge.com/ahynes1 (without logging into that site). I click on subscribe. When it asks for my profile, I enter http://identi.ca/ahynes1 If it works properly, it then subscribes me and takes me to my subscribers. It is worth noting that there are various problems with remote subscriptions depending on which version of laconi.ca you are running. As to scalability, I'll leave that to someone else. I'm running on a very low powered shared host. It is sufficient for my testing purposes. Hope this helps. Thoughts or comments are appreciated. Aldon -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Adam Beguelin Sent: Friday, August 01, 2008 10:40 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Laconica-dev] Scaling through federation I'm interested in understanding how Laconica scales. From what I can tell, the main idea is that Laconica scales by allowing lots of different sites work together in a federated way. This means that anyone can setup their own instance of laconica. That instance of laconica can connect to other instances of laconica by forwarding updates. This means that a user of a particular instance of laconica, say identica, can get updates from someone using a different instance of laconica, say decafbad. Are there any existing examples of federated copies of laconica running? Is the subscription sitewide or on a user by user basis. For example, would the public timeline of one site be replicated to the subscribing site? How does one user subscribe to a user on another instance of laconica? I'm also curious how a single instance of Laconica would scale. Say identica became very popular and was getting overloaded, how would one scale that particular instance of laconica? My guess is that the bottleneck would be the database access and that going some master/ slave architecture would be a first step. Is the underlying code written to support this kind of scaling? Is anyone running an instance of laconica with more than an single database server? I notice that the table types are MyISAM. This is probably so MySQL full text search can be used. Of course this won't work very well once the notice table gets large (millions) and/or the update rate increases. MyISAM uses full table locks. This means that the entire table is locked when an update is added to the notify table. Lots of full table locking means things will get slow when you have lots of updates, especially on a large table. Sorry to ask so many questions! Regards, Adam _______________________________________________ Laconica-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev _______________________________________________ Laconica-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
