this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Just started self hosting this instance. Nothing on the docs mentioned anything about storage considerations.

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[–] [email protected] 253 points 1 year ago (8 children)

This is lemmy.world after 4 weeks:

58G	pictrs
34G	postgres
[–] [email protected] 70 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Considering this is going to be around a 5 user instance at most I think I'll be good for awhile. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

im running 50 users right now, subbed to A LOT of communities, seeing db growth of about 100mb per day.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That seems high when you extrapolate that to 10000 users, like a larger instance might have.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

It's all about how many communities your user(s) subscribe to since your instance basically acts as a mirror for those.

My instance has been running for 23 days, and I am pretty much the only active local user:

7.3G    pictrs
5.3G    postgres

edit: I may have a slight ~~Reddit~~ Lemmy problem

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So if you're the only user (let's assume for ease) then, that represents all the updates (posts, comments, votes) from each community that you are subscribed to?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, and I purposely subscribe to (or sometimes have a dedicated "federation helper bot" account I run subscribe to) most of the most popular communities on the most popular instances so I can get a decent sampling of what's going on in the fediverse on the "All" feed. So I assume my storage usage is maybe a bit higher than what an "average" single-user instance may be...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

lmao same here. I have a spare account that I use to sub to everything worth subbing to. I haven't automated it yet though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ooh, that's a really good idea, I need a federation helper bot/account when I start self-hosting a Lemmy instance!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah it's not automated or anything, I just pop an incognito window and use it when there is a communitI think is worth seeing sometimes in "All" (or just for archiving purposes) but don't want to clutter "Subscribed". I may make something to auto-subscribe to communities meeting some criteria or something at some point in the future...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do you also post stuff? I mean my instance is only about an hour old, but I've subscribed to some communities, yet I don't see the picture service consuming the S3 storage I've configured

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Lemmy caches every thumbnail of every post for like a month or something using Pictrs, so that storage will eventually hit a sort of equilibrium and start growing much more slowly (only reflecting post/thumbnail volume during the cache time).

Between profile images, community banners/icons, post images etc. there are probably a few dozen images that will be sticking around for the long haul at the moment.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Your instance only caches thumbnails, so it won't take much space. The full images are served from the remote instance. So you basically only store whatever your users upload.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It won't scale linearly. A lot of those users will be subscribed to subs the instance is already replicating. It would only be new subs that would add to the growth.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

And only active subs. And even then, it's just text and tiny thumbnails.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Question if you know: does a lemmy instance have to be publically accessable to work? Like, if I make an instance on my homelab can the instance "fetch" content and serve it faster locally? Could I reply to a post and have others see it? Etc

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Now I wonder how viable it would be to support video hosting. The answer is almost certainly "God no!"

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Honestly, Less than I thought!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Interesting, I thought it would be waaayyy more

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

At the end of the day the vast majority of what needs to be saved is text. If media content is embedded, the the server just has to save the path to the file not the file itself.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah lemmy seems to use just about nothing for data storage.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Wow, that is surprisingly not bad given the size of the instance!

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is my small instance with way fewer users than lemmy.world.

11G	pictrs
5.2G	postgres
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Out of curiosity, how long has your instance been up? Just want to get a sense of how fast storage is increasing for you.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How has your Lemmy experience been on a self hosted instance? I'm currently using lemmy.world and it's very error prone, would self hosting reduce those errors at the expense of anything? Does federation take long or do you find you're getting federated content quickly enough?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The experience has been pretty good, to be honest. No instability, easy updates, etc. I find federated content quite quickly, because I use this script to populate the "All" feed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I didn't make it! :) I think, @[email protected] made it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

You won't get any old content, so that's a downside. You'll only get content after you start federating. Unless someone votes or comments on old content.

Other than that the only downside is spending time maintaining and updating it.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there any way to purge old data?

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I really hope it doesn't get purged if lemmy is to be a Reddit replacement. A lot of the value Reddit had was obscure knowledge and making google searches actually usable.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think as long as the original community the post is in doesn't purge the data, it's fine for other instances to purge if necessary.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Exactly, when dealing with big data, you need a strategy to archive old data. You can't just store everything in one DB. Smaller instances may not feel like keeping all the date from all the time. Even big instances should have a mechanism to move old data do different databases.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

My instance has 13 users, and has been up for 2 months now:

1.5G    ./pictrs
3.4G    ./postgres
[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

476M ./postgres 1.1G ./pictrs

After 3 weeks

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

How many users?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Depends. If you have a lot of users posting a lot of pictures and you use pictrs out of the box config, then a lot. If you are just running a few users with finite communities being synced then a lot less. The number is going to vary a lot as lemmy grows and gets older so hard to document realistic expectations. But docker images are probably going to take up more disk space than actual contents for now unless you get quite big. My instance is just me and I just threw my PG volume into a tgz to move servers and it's less than a gig after a month ish.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The lemmy.world admin said above that their instance currently takes up less than 100GB

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Small instance with about 3 users and myself online for about 2 weeks.

pictrs   930M
postgres 1.4G
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Unless they changed all of the comment and post ids to bigints that'll probably bring the site down before it runs out of storage. In defense of the lemmy developers they have been receptive to feedback, so I don't think it'll take long for that to be fixed if it hasn't already.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

lol lemmy died almost immediately after i posted this time to figure out what the hell caused that

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

it was because i set a damn server icon

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

lmao just how powerful is your server icon?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

My instance eats up almost 100MB everyday. It mostly depends on what your users subscribe to. It was barely growing on my first few days until I invited a couple of friends over to try it out.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

After hosting my own instance with just me for ca. 2 weeks:

1.99Gi pictrs

5.21Gi postgres

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How many cans-of-beans.jpg can you store?

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