Version 0.19.X Deployment
Hello world!
I’m sure many of you fine folks have been wondering why we have not upgraded to version 0.19.X yet.
The whole team here has been getting asked this question quite a bit, from both members of the community and other instance admins. We want everyone to know, YES, we will upgrade to version 0.19.
We do not have a hard date set for when we will be upgrading as of yet, as we have about 7 associated task items that go along with this upgrade for things we need to double-check and confirm there will be no breakage.
Another big reason why we have not upgraded is due to reports from other instance admins that the front-end GUI can have performance issues. While a large portion of folks access our site using apps on their phones, we would rather not degrade the user experience for the rest of everyone else.
Worst case in terms of UI slowness, we would ask everyone to use either Alexandrite () or Photon () to mitigate the potential performance issues.
One final point to mention to address the delay is that we usually wait 1-2 weeks after a new release before applying it to production. This was complicated by the fact that there were multiple releases right after each other, with each new release having issues we hoped would be patched in the NEXT version. A new version would come up, and we would have to evaluate the stability and performance of it, which would take about 2 weeks, and then ANOTHER version would come out, which we would need to test. This was further complicated by the fact this was during the holiday season.
| Version | Release Date |
|---|---|
| 0.19.0 | 2023-12-15 |
| 0.19.1 | 2023-12-20 |
| 0.19.2 | 2024-01-10 |
| 0.19.3 | 2024-01-24 |
For us, stability is paramount, as we care very much about keeping everyone happy here.
While we can appreciate the rapid release of patches on 0.19, I hope everyone can now understand the delay. If all goes well, we will set a release day in the next week or two, most likely on a Saturday around 1800 UTC.
-jelloeater85
I just love how professional the Lemmy instances have become. They went from having stability issues to being extremely stable. I love our Lemmy community.
Keep up the good work!
I just love how professional the Lemmy instances have become.
Too bad upstream Lemmy development didn’t adapt. The early 0.19 releases left several big instances hanging with severe bugs leaving them practically unusable.
In the developers defense, there are some bugs that don’t appear until a a certain workload threshold is crossed. It’s entirely possible for code to pass all tests and yet break when under heavy load in the real world (which can be difficult to simulate).
Yeah many bugs are difficult to catch, but the federation and timestamp issue, was something different and almost like a joke that got out of hand.
Thank you for all your hard work!
Thanks for all this info, I knew running the largest Lemmy instance would be challenging in term of version upgrade, and I’m happy you keep us posted on all your plans! Keep up the good work!
Yeah, I think the transparency and inclusivity of this instance serves as a model. I love knowing that places like this can exist.
Speaking as someone who is on an instance (lemmy.today) that ran into a bunch of breakage from the 0.19.X releases, and which still isn’t fully resolved, and where the instance admin said that he wished that he could downgrade to 0.18.X but couldn’t due to schema changes, I strongly endorse a conservative approach. The releases have not really met the bar that one might want for stability.
That’s especially true for lemmy.world, since it hosts a large chunk of the Fediverse communities, and if it has serious problems, there are gonna be spillover effects even on users elsewhere. I’d wait until less-critical instances have been the guinea pig for a bit on releases.
