This is lemmy.world after 4 weeks:
58G pictrs
34G postgres
Considering this is going to be around a 5 user instance at most I think I'll be good for awhile. Thanks!
im running 50 users right now, subbed to A LOT of communities, seeing db growth of about 100mb per day.
That seems high when you extrapolate that to 10000 users, like a larger instance might have.
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
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?
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...
Ooh, that's a really good idea, I need a federation helper bot/account when I start self-hosting a Lemmy instance!
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...
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
Now I wonder how viable it would be to support video hosting. The answer is almost certainly "God no!"
Wow, that is surprisingly not bad given the size of the instance!
Honestly, Less than I thought!
Interesting, I thought it would be waaayyy more
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.
Yeah lemmy seems to use just about nothing for data storage.
Feels like this will benefit from some sort of fuzzy deduplication in the pictrs storage. I bet there are a lot of similar pics in there. E.g. if one pic or a gif is very similar to another, say just different quality or size, or compression, it should keep only one copy. It might already do this for the same files uploaded by different people as those can be compared trivially via hashing, but I doubt it does similarity based deduplication.
My instance has 13 users, and has been up for 2 months now:
1.5G ./pictrs
3.4G ./postgres
This is my small instance with way fewer users than lemmy.world.
11G pictrs
5.2G postgres
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?
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.
Oh this is very cool
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.
Out of curiosity, how long has your instance been up? Just want to get a sense of how fast storage is increasing for you.
23 days.
476M ./postgres 1.1G ./pictrs
After 3 weeks
How many users?
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 unless you get quite big. I just threw my PG volume into a tgz to move servers and it's less than a gig.
The lemmy.world admin said above that their instance currently takes up less than 100GB
Though this will accrue over time I suppose.
But for self hosting? You should be good for a long long time. The only pictures stored are the ones you upload, the rest is just text.
My instance dormi.zone has been running for around 3½ weeks now, has a 3-digit amount of users and hosts a community with little more than 1000 subscribers. Here's how much storage it currently takes up:
In the default Ansible configuration, storage will mostly be accumulated by log files that are automatically generated by Docker and deleted whenever you restart the Docker containers.
lol lemmy died almost immediately after i posted this time to figure out what the hell caused that
it was because i set a damn server icon
lmao just how powerful is your server icon?
lol, yeah, that would crash any instance
(jokes aside, you'll probably need to keep it somewhat low-res, and i'd also recommend cropping it to square. my instance uses a 128x128 icon)
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.
How many cans-of-beans.jpg can you store?
At least 3. Maybe 4.
Is there any way to purge old data?
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.
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.
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.
Are you planning on donating to instances that don't purge old data?
Small instance with about 3 users and myself online for about 2 weeks.
pictrs 930M
postgres 1.4G
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.
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