We have a problem..
.. the database is broken.
Last week pixeldrain suffered a lot of downtime. It's a problem that can unfortunately not be fixed easily. To get realtime updates on the status of this issue, please follow the #announcements channel in Discord.
The problem
Pixeldrain runs on a database called ScyllaDB. Scylla is an alternative for Apache Cassandra which is about twice as fast and requires half the amount of servers to serve the same traffic.
I was on an old version of ScyllaDB because Scylla changed its license last year. Before, it was open source and free to use. After the change the source code is still available, but you need to negotiate a price for an enterprise subscription to be able to legally use it. For that reason I stayed on the last open source release with the intention of eventually migrating the database to Cassandra, which is completely free.
My old version of Scylla ran into an issue with memory allocation. It is repeatedly crashing every day. Usually it happens around midnight UTC. I have reported this issue to Scylla and they're working on a solution, but there is nothing I can really do in the meantime. We'll just have to live with the instability until the problem is solved.
Believe me when I say I am doing everything I can to get the website to a stable state again.
Why ScyllaDB?
Using ScyllaDB might seem as an odd choice for a relatively small project. I have a long history with databases. The first version of pixeldrain ran on MySQL, but as I started expanding the site I wanted something that could be distributed across the globe so we could have low latency everywhere. The next thing I tried was CockroachDB. It had the distributed part, but it was also very very slow. I quickly ran into scaling issues with Cockroach. When it was clear Cockroach was not going to work, I started looking for alternatives again. I dived really deep this time, I spun up test clusters and compared the internals of multiple databases.
Eventually I decided that Apache Cassandra would work best for me. Cassandra is easily distributed so we can have low latency everywhere. It's also partition tolerant, which means that it can keep functioning even during a network outage (although I have learned that that might not always be a good thing).
Around this time ScyllaDB started frequently appearing on the front page of Hacker News as an open source and high performance alternative to Cassandra. It seemed like a very good deal to me. Discord also published an article about how they migrated their message store from Cassandra to Scylla and it was about twice as fast.
So I thought "If you do it, do it well", and opted to just skip Cassandra entirely and go straight for ScyllaDB. To be fair, Scylla served me very well for a long time. But, I should have seen the bait and switch coming. By now it's pretty much a standard playbook for database startups. You start out free, build until it's stable enough for commercial use, and then you start selling it as a commercial product. It makes sense, these companies need to make money somehow.
Other news
In my yearly recap I hinted at a new site which I coined as FNX.storage back then. I'm still working on it, but I changed the name to Nova.storage. I like this name a lot better, since it's not an acronym without a meaning.
I originally wanted to launch Nova.storage somewhere in June, but with all the crap that's been going on around pixeldrain lately I just can't seem to find the time to work on it for extended periods. Because of this I have not made much progress in the last months. I'll do my best to get it out as soon as possible, but June might be a bit optimistic.
Greetings,
Wim
Comments (32)
i paid for the patreon how do i get the premium for pixeldrain
https://docs.pixeldrain.com/questions_and_answers/#im-having-trouble-activating-my-patreon-subscription
caiu o site aqui pra mim esta off no brasil
The server in brazil has some issues. I turned it off for now.
...Still 4+ hours for a ~4,5gig download...
Thank you for letting everyone know and with a detailed background on the situation. It is sincerely appreciated. Would getting the commercial license be a bit too much beyond what supporters have provided, or is it a matter of principle to not reward these sorts of bait and switch type decisions with supposedly "open source" code? Both are fully understandable. Regardless, you have many of our support.
I mostly just hate sales calls. They seem unwilling to negotiate over e-mail. I just get a teams invite. I'm also a bit of an open source fanatic. Switching to an open alternative would make me happier in the long run.
Hii, Fornax, please tell me that in the free plan, I uploaded the video and shared the link and all the users who download have a limit of downloading 6 GB file per day, similarly if I purchase a plan of 5 dollars and upload the video and share the link, then does every user have a monthly download limit of 4 TB or not, please tell me brother, it is very confusing please reply don't ignore please 🥺
The 4 TB counts for all the files you share from your account. When other people download your files it uses that too.
Does this mean we'll have problems with our downloads? and if so, will our pledges be suspended till this is fixed?
Files cannot be downloaded when the database is having issues. Luckily the crash only happens sometimes, so the site is still usable. If you are affected a lot you can request a refund through patreon
I know it is always something, but this story sounds too familiar lately. Now everyone wants money which is fine IF they are up front about it. Pixeldrain has really changed my life for the better. I know you will get past this setback and I truly appreciate the effort.
pixel is hands down best thing in its field ill cry if it goes away
I've just subscribed for a year 2 days ago, hope this will be resolved soon. fingers crossed!
You provided great service and i have never subscribed to any file hoster longer than pixeldrain. Im confident you will find a solution.
Right. It sounds really bad. Hope it gets fixed. soon I love my Tenacity sub, so I would hate to leave.
Yo feliz de que estás haciendo las cosas bien!! 🌸🐇
thanks for the update, keep going - I know you'll figure it out.
Oh dear.
I've been using your services for years now. I have no worries that you'll do the right thing by us and yourself. No worries, we trust you. :)
As always, I sincerely appreciate the transparency and context info, Wim. Sorry you have to deal with this daunting fix, but I have faith you’ll get everything sorted, hopefully with as minimal stress and hiccups as possible. Best of luck! Thank you again
That midnight memory thing is sus
Hi fornax, Thank you to keep us posted and explain the situation in great length. I would like to say something and maybe it’s not my place or the place of our collective to say this. So, sorry in advance. Why are you even in an LLC or whatever the acronym is for company in your country? Why are you not in an non profit. Do you even do any profits out of this project ? Because if you do not, I am sorry to say this but this is Patreon, it should not be considered as a company, Patreon is literally to contribute to a project. And we can even deduct that from our taxes. And if you are in a non-profit, coming to my point here, why did you not set up a call with an account manager at Scylla to explain your project as a non-profit and ask them if they have non-profit tier (like proxmox, xen, Prometheus, mattermost etc etc all have) and we could even have done a supplemental donation for that license then… we set things up for non-profit all the time as a side hobbies me and my collective. I hope you won’t’ consider that rude and I hope I was clear enough. We are with you no matter what.
Founding a non-profit is a ton of work. I'm just a single guy. I'd like to keep it simple
In regards to the new storage project -- I signed up for Eternity tier purely for Filesystem (I don't use the My Files) and paid for a year. If the new site takes over the functions of Filesystem, will you offer the choice to transfer memberships from Pixeldrain to Nova? Thanks for all you do!
I'll try to make it possible at or shortly after launch
It’s gonna be okay :) Thanks for your work!
I wish you luck. Thank you.
Thank you for all your work, your work means alot to tons of us. Please try not to stress out to much.
Hey man, I believe in you. You’re doing a good job and we just have to be a little bit patient. 👍
Thank you. This port was very informative.
Things will turn out well for you...don't worry.