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Slow photo requests / inbox requests

Hi !Friendica Admins ,

I'm currently tracing down performance issues, I' currently suffering from on my nodes opensocial.at and friendica.me .

It seems like the main performance problems are

  • delivering photos
  • [code]/inbox/code] requests


You can see some peeks and some long runners here:

The long runners (10sec) are the /inbox requests, the peaks are delivering photos after opening conversations, network pane, ...

Do you have any hints how I could improve these two types of requests?

The database is currently using ~50GB RAM, I set them as high as possible.

!Friendica Admins
Roland Häder
Roland Häder  
@Philipp Holzer Temporary install/enable xdebug and set mode=trace. Then use e.g. kcachegrind to analyze it, e.g. which method takes the most time. That might be a start! Yes, you normally want to have xdebug disabled on live (no development) servers. But this is an exception as high load cannot be simulated properly to find the bottleneck.
@Philipp Holzer

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Michael Vogel
Michael Vogel  
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You can enable the asynchronous with 'decoupled_receiver' => true, in your config. Then the inbox requests would be much faster. Then the processing is done via worker processes.

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Michael Vogel
Michael Vogel  
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For the photos you can define the avatar cache:
'avatar_cache' => true,
 'avatar_cache_path' => '/path/to/a/folder',

But that one is tricky to set up. Best is to store the photos in a folder outside the web folder and then you can define a rule in your webserver that will redirect requests to the avatar folder to that folder.

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Roland Häder
Roland Häder  
@Michael Vogel @Philipp Holzer Will these cached avatars be checked if they are outdated? I currently have trouble getting @Tobias 's avatar over here.
@Michael Vogel @Philipp Holzer

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Philipp Holzer
Philipp Holzer  
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@Michael Vogel @Philipp Holzer why is it necessary to have the folder outside of the web folder?
@Michael Vogel @Philipp Holzer

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Michael Vogel
Michael Vogel  
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It will become extremely large over time. So storing in some separate folder might be better for backup purposes or for keeping your web root clean. Also there is an option for an alternate URL. So you could even store these files on some separate web server that only serves static content.

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Philipp Holzer
Philipp Holzer  
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@Michael Vogel @Philipp Holzer is the avatar cache necessary for the workers too or just for the frontend app?
@Michael Vogel @Philipp Holzer

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Michael Vogel
Michael Vogel  
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These two don't depend on each other.

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Philipp Holzer
Philipp Holzer  
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So I do need to redirect only the /photo/contact route for the avatar cache, don't I?
Michael Vogel
Michael Vogel  
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No, the setup process is completely different. You have to have a path (somewhere) that is both readable and writable by the frontend and backend process
This path needs to be reachable when you call https://your.server.tld/avatar (you have to redirect /avatar) or you have to define avatar_cache_url.

You you setup the file path from above in avatar_cache_path and set avatar_cache to true. After you deactivate the caching of the avatars in the admin frontend, it should work.

The URL path is stored in the contact table fields. So once you defined that URL, you mustn't change it again, since all old requests would fail. This mechanism is powerful, but currently too easy to misconfigure, that's why it is only accessible via the config file.

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Philipp Holzer
Philipp Holzer  
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I think I got it. I try it with my friendica.philipp.info node first and check it :-)

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Michael Vogel
Michael Vogel  
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Have a look at https://github.com/friendica/friendica/blob/develop/src/Contact/Avatar.php for a deep dive.

friendica/Avatar.php at develop · friendica/friendica

Friendica Communications Platform. Contribute to friendica/friendica development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub

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Roland Häder
Roland Häder  
@Michael Vogel @Philipp Holzer U oh, writable and readable by the frontend, means web server? Do you mean here also through https://? That's never a good idea.
@Michael Vogel @Philipp Holzer

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Philipp Holzer
Philipp Holzer  
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seems to work : https://friendica.philipp.info/avatar/4c/a1/d7c/53/8b/f08b/cd3c2904ac0bfd56-300.png?ts=1682970014

This image is now served by a completely different nginx than the frontend nginx . Because it's stateless, I'm now able to start more nginx for "just" serving stateless static content!

Brilliant!

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Michael Vogel
Michael Vogel  
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Old avatars still will be served the old way and will be replaced, once they are updated - which can take weeks. But I guess I wrote some script that speeds up this process.

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Philipp Holzer
Philipp Holzer  
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currently, "movetoavatarcache" is running on my node :-) 17000 from 59000 finished ;)

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Philipp Holzer
Philipp Holzer  
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Hi, after moving all contact images to avatar/, there are still a lot of long running requests, see the image above. Do you have any idea? The overall CPU/RAM is on a normal state.

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