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Has anyone experienced it on ? Its the second time @ClaraListensprechen4 had this happen but I'm trying to figure out if its specific to them or a general problem.

Clara Listensprechen  
Okay, trying to solve a mystery that crops up only on #QOTO. This time my screen shot includes the time stamp. QOTO was behaving itself until, coin...

@freemo
After I deleted my Universeodon account and, to test, attempted to access it after deletion, Universeodon generated an access error but was displayed in that exact same form/format...so I presume it's a Mastodon-type error.

@ClaraListensprechen4 those errors are indeed produced by the mastodon webclient, though they may just be passing along errors from the server.

@freemo I've had something similar before, but it's been a long time. I stopped using the federated tab on account of it being way too full of low quality content that made it hard to find anything useful + nsfw things I didn't want on my screen.

The federated tab is very much drinking from the firehouse in terms of content, and Mastodon has a default rate limit of three hundred API calls per five minutes (i.e. one per second, on a five minute average). I dunno if QOTO changed that - we have some things like post length limit that are better than default - but there's some limit, anyway. My working hypothesis is that just fetching the new posts gets pretty close to whatever the cutoff is, but doesn't bust it; and sometimes the web client has to make additional API calls that blow the budget. The quoted post mentions that a video came up, so fetching the media file is a plausible additional step that could be to blame.

I believe there is a "slow mode" in the settings. Maybe try that and see if the problem goes away?

@ClaraListensprechen4

@khird

Ahh yes, good point!

I will test the theory, ill open the federated tab and let it run overnight and see if i get any issues...

@ClaraListensprechen4

@khird @freemo
Ya, Kyle, the fact that I use the Federated selection almost exclusively sounds like what might be the cause, per your description. I'm always on that one even if I choose other selections on occasion; that's my main go-to.

One of the reasons I deleted my account on Universedon is because the Federated option disappeared (I guess it updated software and it became "other servers" or something that wasn't available on my main page).

Federated is important over here.

@ClaraListensprechen4 @khird @freemo I've just recently discovered how useful the federated tab is. Anyone aware of developments to apply user-selected filters on it? I'd be interested to help out with developing that, as I think it's a current weakness of the fediverse.

@mapto @khird @freemo
If I were to use such a feature I'd subscribe to all domains, but I guess this indicates why most people don't encounter those errors I brought to your attention. I'm not "most people". 😅

@ClaraListensprechen4 @khird @freemo well, I imagine you wouldn't subscribe to servers in languages you don't understand. At least I hope you won't ;)

@mapto @khird @freemo
Oh--I might as well add that Japanese accounts via Misskey post pictures of cullinary delights, so there's that too.

@ClaraListensprechen4 @khird @freemo I also follow Japanese who post about visual illusions, but am more into conversations than into images. But I also agree with the idea behind your comment regarding translation. The world is such an amazing place, better than fiction, I'd even say

@mapto @khird @freemo
Oh don't get me wrong--with Libre Translate, I can read the Japanese that goes with the dishes and I can get recipes that way.

Apparently "most people" want to hole up in their custom-made data silos, but not me--I'm a globe trotter, and proud of it.

@mapto @khird @freemo

Time and date in the screenshot. I guess there's no cure for this, on this server? It's the only server I've encountered this on.

@ClaraListensprechen4 can you pop into the developer console, network tab, and see what URL it's trying to reach (probably giving you a bunch of 429 responses)?

@mapto @freemo

@khird @mapto @freemo

What exactly is a "developer console" for a person who isn't a developer?

@ClaraListensprechen4 it's a browser tool that lets you edit a page's HTML live, debug executing javascript, inspect network traffic, and a couple other things. It's intended to provide useful information for a developer trying to troubleshoot a problem with his website, but it's widely useful beyond that.

@mapto @freemo

@khird @mapto @freemo
So, where I look for it is in my browser, not QOTO--correct? Commencing to look for it...

@ClaraListensprechen4 yep. In Firefox on Linux it's Tools > Browser Tools > Web Developer Tools.

@mapto @freemo

@khird @mapto @freemo
Okay I've got it up, and so far it's reading qoto.org but I'm not getting errors at this time. I'll keep it open as a contingency when it happens again. Thanks a million for the instructions! Keeping my eyes peeled.

@khird @mapto @freemo
Posting this screenshot as a benchmark of sorts. That nifty browser tool showed a rapid-fire series of qoto interactions but no errors came up, and all it was doing was updating the number of new items in the Federated realm.

I suppose it's conceivable for the interaction rate to become a lot faster beyond a certain number of new items coming in from the Federation; when I get errors, it's often been when I'm just sitting here watching the errors rack up, not touching the keyboard or scrolling or anything.

My account here has always had "slow mode" selected.

@ClaraListensprechen4 that's very useful information. I can see that you're approaching one request per second (I count fifteen requests before hitting the twenty-second mark) - which is already close to bumping you over the limit. Perhaps the biggest smoking gun is the URLs requested: you're constantly getting relationship info. That's not something required to show the timelines, but QOTO has a nonstandard extension which I suspect is to blame: the little icons that show up beneath each user's avatar in the timeline. These icons can change colour based on relationship: grey means neither follows either, yellow means he follows you, blue means you follow him, and green means you each follow the other.

I haven't yet found a way to disable this behaviour on the client side (unchecking the relevant boxes in the settings removes the indicators from the display, but the API calls are still made). Ideally this should be addressed in the QOTO frontend code, but it's not clear how difficult the fix would be. It looks like it's possible to use a single API call to get info on several accounts, so in theory we'd be able to batch up the requests and submit a bunch of them every five seconds or something. Alternatively, it might be possible to make the API calls only if the user has the feature enabled (the frontend should have that information already), but I don't know the code well enough to say how much else would need to be changed. The straightforward approach of outright blocking requests to the relationships endpoint causes errors, unfortunately.

@freemo the offending call is dispatch(fetchRelationships([status.reblog ? status.reblog.account_id : status.account_id, status.quote ? status.quote.account_id : null].filter(function(e){return e}))) in mastodon/actions/timelines.js.

@mapto

@ClaraListensprechen4 have you observed whether it tends to fail at particular times? A bunch of bots may all post hourly at the top of the hour (or maybe daily at midnight Greenwich time) and cause a temporary spike in traffic which busts the rate limits.

@freemo @mapto

@khird @freemo @mapto
As to particular times, there's been no discernable pattern to it, actually. Then again, I didn't know about this tool back then either.

@khird @freemo @mapto
Here's a screenshot of the traffic when I'm on the Notifications page and it's nowhere near the Federated rate...and again, I observe that the Federated rate coincides with the frequency that the New Items number updates.

@khird @freemo @mapto
Food for thought, that. When I switched from Federated to Home there were a lot of requests to a cloud account for a trainload of jpg and color files. Hmmmmm.

@khird @freemo @mapto

After days of behaving itself, the error came up again and according to this screenshot, it's all QOTO. The flags in the leftmost column changed to green when the errors cleared up.

@khird @freemo @ClaraListensprechen4

I wanted to suggest enabling the slow mode as well. I think that might help if you're using the Federated Timeline a lot.

@freemo @ClaraListensprechen4

I have encountered this a few times before (maybe one or two times?). It's rare, and I don't know how I triggered that.

The last time I had this issue was on my Android tablet, I switched from the browser to another app and then quickly switched back, then I got a lot of rate limit warning, and I do have to wait until I can fetch updates and post toot.

@freemo I switched from fedilab to the web browser before I encountered the problem, it shouldn't be fedilab.

My educated guess is somehow the JS script for fetching updates get stucked or misdispatched by the browse/app (when I switch to other app). and suddently send out a lot of request at once (when I switch back to the browser), considering I only encountered this issue on Android, not on PC.

But considering what @ClaraListensprechen4 got, I'm not sure what cause the problem. Maybe related to swap?

@freemo @skyblond
Don't know what "fedilab" is so I'm sure there's no such thing on my computer. Hmmm.

@freemo @ClaraListensprechen4

Happens to me once every so often (2 weeks?), but I haven't seen any correlation with videoful posts. I thought that this is caused by me having 5+ tabs of qoto open that I forgot about and all of them polling for new posts, so I didn't try actually investigating.

@robryk @freemo @ClaraListensprechen4 yes qoto is very stable, never had any issue of any kind. thanks for your work @freemo

@robryk

Yea if you have lots of tabs open all going to qoto thrn this would be expected

@ClaraListensprechen4

@freemo @robryk
I repeat: I have only one window open on QOTO. I do not use browser tabs AT ALL. I have other windows open on OTHER locations on the Internet. Rule that out again, and keep on ruling that out every time, please.

I never use tabs as in never ever ever ever never, and I'm never using a mobile device, as in never ever ever ever ever never.

There exists a certain number of repetitions which strain one's patience, thank you.

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