DevOps Articles

Optimizing Mastodon Performance with Sidekiq and Redis Enterprise

In the last six months, the open source Mastodon platform has attracted millions of new users and made organizations contemplate creating their own servers (called instances, in Mastodon parlance). In my previous article, “https://thenewstack.io/how-to-boost-mastodon-server-performance-with-redis/,” I noted that one chokepoint in Mastodon servers is its Sidekiq queues, which depend in turn on Redis queues.

We realized that we needed to connect Mastodon and Sidekiq to an external Redis instance, most conveniently to a Redis Enterprise Cloud instance.

Our first step was to demonstrate that we could connect Mastodon and its Sidekiq job queue to an external Redis Enterprise Cloud instance.

The four-shard cluster seemed like overkill, so we tried again with a smaller, single-shard Redis Enterprise Cloud database (rated for 25,000 ops/sec and 5 GB deployment), which showed 15 to 30 ops/sec load from the Sidekiq queues coming from Mastodon.