takahe/docs/releases/0.10.rst

0.10
====

*Released: 2023/11/12*

This release is a polish release that mostly focuses on performance, stability
and federation compatibility.

This release's major changes:

* Stator, the background task system, has been significantly reworked to require
  smaller indexes, spend less time scheduling, and has had most of its async
  nature removed, as this both reduces deadlocks and improves performance in
  most situations (the context switching was costing more than the gains from
  talking to other servers asynchronously).

Minor changes also include:

* Followers-only mode now works correctly inbound and outbound (though outbound
  may need the other server to refresh the profile first).

* Profile pages are no longer shown for remote identities; instead, users are
  linked or redirected directly to the remote profile page.

* Inbound migration has been implemented, but is disabled by default as outbound
  migration is not yet complete, and we don't want to release a system that
  captures users with no outward path. If you *really* want to enable it, set
  ``TAKAHE_ALLOW_USER_MIGRATION=true`` in your environment.

* Federation compatibility has been improved with several other servers.

* Blocked domains now receive absolutely zero fetches from Takahē; previously,
  they were still pinged occasionally to see if they were online.

* SMTP servers that don't require authentication are now supported.

* Python 3.11 is now the minimum version required; this will not affect you at
  all if you run Takahē via our docker image, as is recommended.

An automatic remote post pruning system, to shrink the database of old data
that was no longer needed, was in the development version but has been switched
to a set of manual commands as of 0.10.1 - you can read more below or in
:doc:`/tuning`.

If you'd like to help with code, design, or other areas, see
:doc:`/contributing` to see how to get in touch.

You can download images from `Docker Hub <https://hub.docker.com/r/jointakahe/takahe>`_,
or use the image name ``jointakahe/takahe:0.10``.


0.10.1
------

*Released: Not Yet Released*

This is a bugfix and small feature addition release:

* The ``runstator`` command now logs its output to the terminal again

* Two new commands, ``pruneposts`` and ``pruneidentities`` are added, to enable
  pruning (deletion of old content) of Posts and Identities respectively.
  You can read more about them in :doc:`/tuning`.

* Stator's default concurrency levels have been significantly reduced as it's
  now way more efficient at using individual database connections, but as a
  result it places way more load on them. You can read more about tuning this
  in :doc:`/tuning`.


Upgrade Notes
-------------

Migrations
~~~~~~~~~~

There are new database migrations; they are backwards-compatible, but contain
very significant index changes to all of the main tables that may cause the
PostgreSQL deadlock detector to trigger if you attempt to apply them while your
site is live.

We recommend:

* Temporarily stopping all instances of the webserver and Stator
* Applying the migration (should be less than a few minutes on most installs)
* Restarting the instances of webserver and Stator

Stator
~~~~~~

Stator's new internal architecture allocates a worker thread and a database
connection up to its concurrency value; this means it is a _lot_ more efficient
for a given "concurrency" number than the old system and also uses a lot more
database connections. We recommend you reduce your configuration values for
these by 5-10x; if you didn't set them manually, then don't worry, we've
reduced the default values by a similar amount.