Under New Management#

Hi folks, @brook here. A little over a week ago, I heard that peoplemaking.games was thinking of shutting down due to the cost and time required to deal with technical issues.

I’ve been running the sunny.garden server for pretty much exactly as long as peoplemaking.games has been around – coincidentally they both launched only one day apart in April 2022 – and I thought I could probably lend that experience towards helping out with PMG.

I approached @esdin about helping out with system tuning, administration, etc. and we agreed to transfer ownership of the server.

Server Upgrades#

At first I took a look into the previous system and made a few adjustments that I could to address performance right away, but the big bottle-neck turned out to be the extremely slow performance of the disk the database was stored on.

I set up a new system mirroring the configuration I’ve been using on sunny.garden, and on May 29 I took PMG offline in order to migrate the server to that new hardware. For the curious, PMG is now hosted at OVHcloud Canada, in their Quebec data centre.

When I had tested the database dump the previous day it had completed in 4.5 hours, but during the actual migration it ended up taking over 6 hours. Sorry for the extended maintenance!

During the migration, the OS and system software were upgraded, the database was upgraded from PostgreSQL 14 to 17, and Mastodon was updated to v4.3.8+glitch.

Since then…

  • Translate has been re-enabled using a locally hosted LibreTranslate
  • Elasticsearch installed and full text search re-enabled
  • Set up a caching proxy to serve media (media.peoplemaking.games).
  • Migrated the media from Wasabi S3 to OVH S3.
  • Switched email notifications from Mailgun + Zoho to self hosted.

Only transferring the actual domain and DNS remains, and we’re waiting on the registry for that at this point.

Moving Forward#

Thanks to everyone for your patience through the recent instability.

My expectation is that things should be much more stable now, so please let me know if you have continuing (or new) issues while accessing the server. I can also be reached by email, or Discord.

Patreon#

For those of you who have been contributing to server upkeep through the Patreon, we’ve transferred that over as well. So if you’d like to continue contributing, you shouldn’t have to take any action, and thank you!

I don’t have a full month worth of billing information yet, but since the system is so similar to sunny.garden’s, I estimate the monthly costs will run about $125 CAD ($90 USD). This first month will be higher due to the one-time setup fee for the dedicated server. Starting next month I plan on posting monthly updates with a breakdown of the actual costs and donations.