Ideas / People for stabilizing gpodder.net

[RollingStar]

gpodder.net has had serious downtime these past few months. It appears to have lost its maintainer.

gPodder Community,

I've been serving as the primary steward of gPodder.net for the past couple years and it has truly been eye-opening and educational. I now embark on a new educational experience in January and would like to pass the torch to someone else since I'll be tied up with that for at least a year and a half (while still working).

If anyone is interested, please drop me a line at josh@xxxxxxxxx and I'll let you know what's involved. Thanks!

Josh

Some people have popped up offering technical and financial support.

Tech ideas:

It won't. Too many database queries using full table scans. Can't just throw new hardware or software at a problem like that and expect it to be fixed. Could have taken several fixes from my fork and maybe fixed some long standing issues.

Since gpodder.net is hosted by Tornado VPS and from the single exposed service name appears to have everything hosted on one host running a general purpose OS, in order of decreasing effort the project could

1. Migrate to native cloud based microservices with global CDN, cacheing, transparent scaling, etc.,
2. Tune and optimise the existing platform, application and code to make optimal use of all available resources [e.g. is all the crypto using CPU acceleration?], or
3. Start a Pateon/SubscribeStar/... crowd fund to get a bigger VPS. It appears that the biggest is "only" $660 / year.

My idea for restoring service:

1. Determine the easiest path to providing some functionality. Can it go read-only? Can it just provide info for the top 20 podcasts? Can it temporarily go donor-only?
2. Do a quick investigation into probable causes of the downtime.
3. Publish this info on official pages (gpodder twitter, gpodder site), and open source communities (reddit, hacker news).
4. Ask for two things: money and technical help to do a deeper dive on stabilizing the service. Probably 95% of the people who read the post will not be able to offer tech support, but may be able to contribute to a fundraiser. This will be more successful if we can ballpark an estimate to bring the site back ($660/year maybe?).
5. Transition to a longer-term support model. Will require all the stuff that's hard to get in free projects: community management, project management, technical skill, money.

All easier said than done. Still, I get a lot of value from podcasts and part of that is being able to search for pods, subscribe to them, and track which episodes I've played when I migrate devices. I'm willing to contribute money and time where able. I do have good database experience.

https://github.com/gpodder/mygpo/issues/761

https://www.freelists.org/post/gpodder/Understanding-gpoddernet-performance-struggles

https://www.freelists.org/post/gpodder/gPoddernet-Handoff

[ddub]

I'm interested in helping out, do you have anywhere except for here that you want to co-ordinate?

[vsellier]

Hi,

I am also willing to help out.

I can help on system administration, profling, and backend development if there is some needs. Feel free to dm me.

[Ryochan7]

I wanted to help improve this project late last year (IIRC) but that fell through. Made much more progress when I decided to fork the project and do work on my own. Had to make a lot of configuration and some model changes to get the code to do what I wanted. Hosting the project on a Linode VPS was probably a better idea than whatever host is being used currently for gpodder.net; needed a 2 GB VPS as everything was consuming around 900 MB of RAM with the environment and all the workers initialized. The final database, after a few months of running an instance, ended up being around 2 GB in size; still got the last backup.

https://github.com/Ryochan7/alphagpo/ https://github.com/Ryochan7/alphagpo-feedservice

[RollingStar]

I'm interested in helping out, do you have anywhere except for here that you want to co-ordinate?

There's an email thread happening now with the old maintainer and some new volunteers. I think you can find his email here. https://www.freelists.org/list/gpodder

[andor-pierdelacabeza]

Hi @RollingStar . Is that a private or public thread? I did ask a question about this in the list but it seems rather dead.

I could lend a hand with sysadmin, linux, hosting, Docker, Kubernetes... and a small bit of python.

[Ryochan7]

Hi @RollingStar . Is that a private or public thread? I did ask a question about this in the list but it seems rather dead.

I could lend a hand with sysadmin, linux, hosting, Docker, Kubernetes... and a small bit of python.

Tried that late 2021. Went nowhere. Was far better off when I had the means to host my own instance.