As the reddit mods gets ready for the June 12-14 black-out, there some anticipation that an influx in user base will shift over to many of the lemmy instances as user seek out a home to post their internet memes and discuss their interests.
In anticipation of this increased volume I will be growing our current instance from
- 16 CPU
- 8 GB ram
to
- 24 CPU
- 64 GB ram
This server is currently equipped with SSDs that are configured in a raid 10 array (NVMEs will come in the next gen that get deployed)
Earlier today I also configured some monitoring that I'll be watching closely in order to have a better understanding on how the lemmy platform does under stress (for science!)
I'll be sharing graphs and some other insights in this thread for everyone that is interested. Feel free to ask anything you might be interested in knowing more of!
EDIT: I'll be posting and updating the graphs in this main post periodically! Last updated: 6:21AM ET June 12th
CPU - 48 hours
Memory - 48 hours
Network - 48 hours
Load Average - 48 hours
System Disk I/O - 48 hours
Can this thing run on a Pi clone with 4GB RAM and 4 cores?
It can definitely run on a Pi instance. The storage medium is going to be important as it will need to house a PostgreSQL database. Would be fine for a few users but not sure how many it would be able to handle concurrently.
It's got 4 cores at 2.16GHz (I think 🤔), 4GB of RAM. Regarding the storage, that can be arranged. Currently there's a 32GB SD card in it, it can be swapped for a 512GB one, no prolem.
So, how many users can an instance on a Pi like that serve?
My biggest concern with your setup is the SD card. SD cards aren't typically known for their write durability. There is a way to use a SSD drive instead however its been a while since I checked the pi stats and might limited at speeds of usb 2. You'll be fine for a small amount of users but you're going to hit a bottleneck pretty quickly if you make your instance open to all.
This is actually a Pi clone, BannanaPi, it has more I/Os than a Pi, but it doesn't have SATA... so, I can't plug in an SSD, the best I can do is plug in a USB and save and load from that, but, as you said, it's limited to USB 2.0 transfer speed.
Sorry, I just don't have the funds to run a full blown server at home. A Pi is the best I can do 🤷.
Maybe ask someone from r/homelab to run an instance or two, those people have like a lot of extra hardware, not to mention they don't mind spending a lot of money on electricity bills.
I was looking at that earlier too. I found LemmyNet on GitHub but haven't had a chance to test it. But "can it run" is also a fundamentally different question than "can it run smoothly for end users as it gets hit with a huge influx of users," and given the larger context of a potential Reddit exodus, that scalability concern is probably not negligible.
My point was, those that can, make one, fill it till it can serve users, then just disable registrations, so it doesn't overload.