Since the big Twitter wave that flooded the Mastodon network and, more broadly, the Fediverse in the fall and winter of 2022, international users have been playing a bigger role for metalhead.club. The service is hosted entirely in Germany, and that was still the case until recently. However, with the increasing number of international members come new challenges: for example, the rapid delivery of content.
As long as users are mainly located in Germany and Europe, latency times to the “Full Metal Server” in Frankfurt are low.
Mastodon has recently gained popularity amongst tech-savvy users after Elon Musk has bought Twitter. With November’s wave of new Mastodon users, many servers experienced mayor problems with their performance - so did metalhead.club, the Mastodon instance that I’m hosting myself. Here’s how I tackled performance issues on metalhead.club.
Lately I switched from a binary Ejabberd package to a self-built version of Ejabberd on my XMPP server trashserver.net. This was done mainly because the “Debian Backports” repository did not offer the version of Ejabberd that I urgently needed. While the repo was stuck at 20.02, I wanted to provide the users 20.04 to be able to drastically improve the user experience during video calls.