I've noticed a lot of chatter about setting up Elasticsearch for Mastodon 4.2's new full text search over the last few days, including what hardware is required, how difficult is it, etc.
So I thought I’d write down my experience, including the hardware I'm running Elasticsearch on for my single user instance:
@enusbaum I went to check if I needed to update #Elasticsearch on my #Mastodon server and then realized that I don't have Elasticsearch on my server because I have 4GB of RAM on my server and Elasticsearch would die on my server.
How to use Elasticsuite to boost the search results by a manually defined sorting relevance? This can be solved just by configuring Elasticsuite, no code adaptions are needed. I've documented the steps in my bitExpert blog post https://blog.bitexpert.de/blog/elasticsuite_sort_relevance_boost
can confirm. The new fulltext search works great, and is awesome! I just searched for "footiMac" which I know only I use and it returned results very very quickly. I can go way back. Including to it's very first mention back in January!
This ability is so very important for the usability and attractiveness of Mastodon!
Unsere #Mastodon Instanz wurde gestern auf die neue Version 4.2.0 aktualisiert. :tux: Es bietet viele Verbesserungen, von der Suche, dem Onboarding-Prozess, bis zur Oberfläche und viele mehr!
Darüber hinaus betreiben wir nun auch #ElasticSearch im Hintergrund, also einen Suchindex. Wir werden deshalb auch bald unserem Server mehr Power geben müssen.
Profilbeschreibungen werden nun auch in der #Suche erfasst, genauso wie eure Posts, wenn ihr dies optional einstellt.
So I'm deploying #ElasticSearch on my #selfhost server right now. It’s importing the "accountsIndex”. It says ###/561466. Does that mean 561,466 accounts have interacted with my server in some way? If so. That's pretty wild. But also, if Mastodon ever got big... that number would likely go up exponentially and my little server would?? 🔥🤯🤪 #MastoAdmin
#MastoAdmin any advice/recommendations for minimum CPU/storage/RAM etc requirements? I know it will be resource heavy but want to get a sense of how much would we need to beef up our server...
Hmmm 🤔 #mastodon memory leak or I just don't understand how things work. #Sidekiq seemingly can handle all the jobs quite easily, yet after a couple days of my instance running without restarting, RAM usage grows quite high, talking 80% with #elasticsearch enabled on a 16 GB machine. Is it normal? Or does that mean memory leak somewhere? Maybe I should spend a week figuring out how to run another instance and load balance, but I feel this shouldn't be necessary for a single user instance...🤷🏻♂️
I added Elasticsearch to my tiny Mastodon instance hosted on Fly.io and you can too! Was hoping to give it a small VM to keep the cost down, but ES won't even deign to respond to an HTTP request without at least 2GB of RAM at its disposal, so I guess we'll see how this goes.
#Gentoo mailing list archives are broken for almost 3 months now. While marc.info is advocated as a stop-gap solution, it doesn't cover all our mailing lists (I don't think any of the third-party archives do). We really need someone to fix this.