You can start learning about plants by making use of local field guides. In the EU we have Collin's guides (Tree Guide, Wild Flower). I can also recommend "Identification of Trees and Shrubs in Winter Using Buds and Twigs" by Bernd Schulz which has beautiful illustrations of the details of the twigs and buds of plants during winter, and so it is great for learning to identify trees when they lack leaves. This book is also EU-centered. If you would like a technical book to get really into evolution and taxonomy of plants, I can recommend Plant Systematics by Michael G. Simpson, which is quite good! This one covers plants from around the entire world, but it is not light reading.

For plant nutrition, I read "Soil Science for Gardeners" by Robert Pavlis before I bought the more technical plant nutrition one. Robert Pavlis is the author of a website about gardening myths (https://www.gardenmyths.com/) and he has some books about compost and plant science. I have only read the Soil Science one and it is good. It covers the structure of different types of soil, how nutrients stick to and are release from soil grains as a function of factors such as acidity, the structure of roots, etc... If like this book but feel like you would like to know the details much more in-depth, you can then get Mineral Nutrition of Higher Plants by Horst Marschner, which is a technical text that goes into specifics about the types of nutritients, the concentrations that you can expect under different conditions, their transport into roots and through the plant, metabolism, etc... This book requires a good understanding of chemistry and it is dense, with lots of tables, figures, and data.

(@Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz ) I think it is related with the processing of so many activities per second while syncing with Lemmy.World.

I have tried changing some rate limits and the number of maximum database connections, but I get similar errors while moving around the site. The server is running well below 100% on all metrics, and the logs don't produce an obvious error. I will wait until we catch up with Lemmy.World and see if that fixes the issue. If it doesn't, then I will trouble shoot more in-depth.

The instance is catching up at a rate of ~15 activities/s, and we are 2.5M activities behind. So it should take about 2 days to catch up.

I have tried fiddling with some parameters to see if this could be improved, but I did not find the right knob to tune. Best is probably to just let it run 😄

Ah, thanks!

Hmm, I am not sure about how the queue gets filled. It might be that the instance needs to process all of the older content first.

I will give it some hours and if it does not look like it will catch up, I will look into other methods.

Thanks!

Since the upgrade, I can see (here) that activities from lemmy.world are being fetched significantly faster. I will let it run for some time and hopefully this speed-up is enough to catch up.

Good to hear!

Amazing work! Thanks a lot!! Took me a few days to get to it but I have upgraded now and it looks great 😄

I also saw it working yesterday but didn't have a chance to respond and do tests 😅

Exactly! It is something that I wanted to do over a year ago, but I was not sure how... Pretty much all my knowledge about servers comes from setting up and trying not to break a lemmy instance, so this was another lesson that I was a bit scared to learn 😂 It turns out that it was very simple as the pict-rs (Lemmy's image backend) developer made a robust migration tool that automates this process. But since I don't know that beforehand, I need to triple check backups and read the instructions several times in preparation so even if it is easy and the hard work has been done by others it still requires some focus.

Yes, I can check!

At the moment I see the message:

We are working on resolving the issues Over the next few days, there will be a change in server infrastructure. Temporary problems with the website's functionality may occur during this time.

I will check again later

Thanks!

Almost a day and only about 50% transferred. I was expecting it to be much faster... I just hope once it finishes it all works smoothly 😄

Yeah! Hello! 🦎

I thought that worse case scenario this would be an overnight transfer, but only 40 GB have been transferred so far.

The server's bandwidth use is well below the limit, so I think that the issue might be on the receiving end (Contabo's S3-compatible object storage).

I had to decrease the number of parallel connections because otherwise I would get too many errors and the transfer would stop, so it might not be the transfer speed of a single file, but rather the amount of time the server has to wait between initiating transfers. I am not sure, but at ~50GB per 12 hours this will end up taking almost 4 days... I will ask in the Matrix chat to see if this was also the experience of others who migrated.

Thanks!

I have collected a few of the posts... I have lagged behind on a few things (object storage, migrating pictrs database to postgres, upgrade to 0.19.4), so I am trying to catch up and during this process I will see if I can implement their solutions.

I have also noticed a generally slower experience when using the instance.. After I move the files to the much cheaper object storage I will be able to allocate more resources to RAM, CPU, and bandwidth. I was under the impression that the slow federation could be related to this decrease in performance, but from what I have read now it seems that it happens independent from this.

Thanks!! I faced an unexpected problem, but now the files are being transferred ^_

The transfer is quite slow. I have timed it for a bit and if the "Used Space" data on the object storage dashboard is correct, files are being transferred at about 120 MB / minute... If that rate is the average, this will take about 40 hours :/ But hopefully the object storage dashboard is lagging. We will see.

Hi!

Yes, I have been told about the slow federation. I have tested a few things - for example, I am able to fetch up-to-date data from Lemmy.World immediately. But I am not entirely sure why the federation is so slow in the background. Has anyone noticed if this affects only lemmy.world?

I have two things planned:

• Move images to object storage, which will be a more efficient way of using space. I can also use what I gain from decreasing disk resources by increasing the RAM and CPU count.
• Upgrade the instance to 0.19.4

My plan is to do these first and hopefully the federation issues are fixed during the process, and if not the next step will be to troubleshoot. But I have been so busy recently, and I do want to have a long block of uninterrupted time in case that things go wrong and I have to spend some time troubleshooting. I will try to do these tomorrow.

EDIT: I have looked through the search for others experiencing similar issues, and it seems to be something experienced in the past by other instances, and so I will try to get some inspiration from those previous experiences: https://mander.xyz/post/10489815

Good to hear! But this one was not me. I could not figure out the root cause, and nothing of significance has changed... Hopefully whatever caused the issue does not reoccur!

I can download the app and test a few things tomorrow. Maybe when the server is rebooted it logs users out for some reason. I am not sure.

Do you have accounts in other servers that do not get disconnected?

Awesome! The one with the sustained source loop is my favorite:

Show

Also, the one that shoots out flames paints a picture similar to how a synchrotron behaves, shooting out X-rays into the beamlines as the electron bunches move around.

Show

Show

Upon looking into it closer, the synchrotron is a bit of a mixture of those two concepts - the source loop (booster ring) that is fed by the linear accelerator, and then the larger loop (storage room) that feeds X-rays the beamlines. Of course, many details differ, but still it is interesting to notice the similarities !

Very nice article! Thanks :D