Delete This Post

This action will delete this post on this instance and on all federated instances, and it cannot be undone. Are you certain you want to delete this post?

No
Yes
Block This Actor

This action will block this actor and hide all of their past and future posts. Are you certain you want to block this actor?

No
Yes
Block This Object

This action will block this object. Are you certain you want to block this object?

No
Yes
Delete OAuth Client

Are you sure you want to delete the OAuth client [Client Name]? This action cannot be undone and will revoke all access tokens for this client.

No
Yes
Revoke OAuth Token

Are you sure you want to revoke the OAuth token [Token ID]? This action cannot be undone and will immediately revoke access for this token.

No
Yes
Todd Sundsted
Todd Sundsted posted 3:41pm
Release v3.5.0 of Ktistec

I really enjoy optimization. Release v3.5.0 of Ktistec doesn't drop significant new features, but it does deliver a ~15% smaller executable and significantly faster queries on anonymous endpoints. The two are intertwined.

The size reduction comes from replacing a poorly designed, custom rules engine with a materialized view layer that uses SQL to define membership in a collection. The rules engine worked well enough but required a lot of supporting code to present rules as a DSL (Domain Specific Language) over the domain objects in ktistec. The driving realization was that SQL is a DSL and membership in a collection is just a query and domain objects are just rows. Voilà!

Query performance improvements came from using this new view layer to materialize two very popular but expensive-to-query views: the instance's public timeline and public hashtag pages. Because both are public pages they receive more traffic than internal pages.

The problem with the original queries was that performance was not uniform. Querying for posts with popular tags was okay. Querying for posts with sparse tags was very slow. I could have added more indexes, but that's its own cost. After the change, endpoints all respond in a consistent ~10msec timeframe and the CPU barely registers when a crawler hits. (I don't want to make things easier for bots, but I don't want to pay a tax for their activity either—ask me about my new nginx configuration.)

Here is the full changelog:

Added

  • Lightweight probe endpoint for authenticated sessions.
  • max-id and min-id pagination links on web pages.

Fixed

  • Correct the notifications collection's JSON representation.
  • Accept both single-value and array forms of JSON-LD properties.
  • Handle variation in schema.org property mapping.

Changed

  • Faster timeline, public, hashtag, and notification collections.
  • Adjust the layout of actor profile properties.

Removed

  • The school dependency; replaced by activity processors and materialized views.
  • The openssl_ext dependency; vendored in.

There are still a few slow queries. In the next release I'm going to see if I can get everything under 10msec, and maybe release a new feature, too. 🚀

#ktistec #crystallang #activitypub #fediverse