The Sunny Gardener - May 2025

– bumblebee on potatoes by @chronocide

Database Repack

The PostgreSQL database storing the posts and other information for sunny.garden increases in size by 200-300MB per day, and like the hard drives of olde, the database can become fragmented, wasting disk space.

About once or twice a year, it starts to become worthwhile to clean up the fragmentation to reclaim some of that wasted space. This can be done by “vacuuming” the database, which I’ve done once or twice in the past during other migrations or system updates. Vacuuming requires taking the server offline, so this time I wanted to try out the tool pg_repack which accomplishes the same thing, but without having to shut down the server.

On May 7th, I ran an online repack of the database which reclaimed about 20GB of free space, dropping the database size from around 103GB down to around 83GB.

Mastodon Update

On May 8th, sunny.garden was updated to Mastodon v4.3.8. This was a minor patch with a few behind the scenes fixes.

Redis Maintenance

The upcoming Mastodon release v4.4 will be removing support for Redis namespaces. Since sunny.garden was originally configured using a Redis namespace, I took sunny.garden offline for a few minutes on May 13th, in order to run the migration script that removed the namespace from our database.

Getting this out of the way now means fewer things to deal with when the update to v4.4 comes out later this year.

People Making Games

The peoplemaking.games server had been struggling with stability issues and keeping up with maintenance recently. It can be a lot of work especially if life events intervene, and things start to pile up. I had seen a couple mentions that PMG might be shutting down, so I reached out to the original admin @esdin to see if I could help out.

We agreed to transfer over ownership of the server instead of shutting it down, so I’ll be maintaining peoplemaking.games as well going forward. I’ve migrated the server infrastructure over to a setup similar to sunny.garden, with a higher powered server, software updates, etc.

As long as the setup between the two is kept similar, maintaining the two in parallel shouldn’t be that much more additional work, and the current admin and mod staff can continue to contribute to moderation and the community as time and energy allow.

PMG has it’s own existing Patreon running for donations, and I’ll be accounting for those costs and donations separately, similar to what I’ve been doing here.

– pigeons in field by @emery

Summary

Hosting Costs

As always, thank you to everyone that has donated on ko-fi! There’s no obligation or expectation that you donate in order to use the server, and I’m still able to cover any shortfall myself if needed.

– Brook