zlacker

So the thing is that in one respect they actually do get caching, almost to a fault. One of the complaints I've seen among some Mastodon instance operators is that they end up storing some pretty hefty amounts of data locally as their instance caches remote posts, images and profiles from other instances that its members follow. One source of problems, which may have been resolved, was that even though there's a job that cleans out this cache the banner images from external profiles stick around. I saw this a while back and it seems like an easy fix so I imagine it's been addressed.

I don't think I am equipped to diagnose what the root cause was here. It's even possible that this instance wasn't intended to have viral posts (i.e. high profile posts that get would get shared to many external users) and they didn't want to invest in hardware/services to facilitate this.

>>smcl+(OP)
I think the GP was referring to caching on the other end, caching static html that can be raised for all anonymous users.

The question is whether the server was having issues with a flood of new posts being sent in and stored, or a flood of anonymous users clicking a link and blogging down when the same html was getting rendered over and over.

Knowing Mastodon, I have a bunch of was the latter with the server coming out on all the new data it was trying to store locally