Selfhosted @lemmy.world i_lost_my_bagel @seriously.iamincredibly.gay 12 mo. ago

How quickly will a lemmy instance eat up storage?

Just started self hosting this instance. Nothing on the docs mentioned anything about storage considerations.

78 comments

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.
  
  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!"
  
  It is viable through other hostings
- 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.
- Wow, that is surprisingly not bad given the size of the instance!
- 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.
This is my small instance with way fewer users than lemmy.world.

11G pictrs 5.2G postgres
- 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.
- 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.
  
  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.
My instance has 13 users, and has been up for 2 months now:

1.5G ./pictrs 3.4G ./postgres
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.
  
  Are you planning on donating to instances that don't purge old data?
476M ./postgres 1.1G ./pictrs

After 3 weeks
- How many users?
Small instance with about 3 users and myself online for about 2 weeks.

pictrs 930M postgres 1.4G
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
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.
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?
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.
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:

6.2 GiB postgres

4.9 GiB pictrs

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

1.99Gi pictrs

5.21Gi postgres
How many cans-of-beans.jpg can you store?
- At least 3. Maybe 4.
I haven't tried it out just yet, but I'd say... a whole lot. Depending of how popular your instance is, but... your PC will be hammered in any way.
It depends on how many communities you end up pulling in. Your instance will only sync with communities that a user on your instance is subscribed to.
- I've had my instance running for about 1 week and I'm the only user.
  
  2.1G pictrs
  
  2.5G postgres
Holding onto all that data is pointless if you’re not selling it to someone.
- I disagree. One big hunk of value of a place like this is being able to look back at old threads. How many times did people say they always put "Reddit" in front of their Google searches to get the information they were looking for? This could be the same.
  
  That’s a good reason for an instance to put “lemmy” in its url too, I imagine. Search engines are already returning Lemmy results for things.
  
  That’s unsustainable. Why do you think the mainstream platforms are selling out?
- Info is still useful for people doing google searches. It would be nice to be able to find common troubleshooting tips on Lemmy, etc.
  
  Not everything posted here holds any value.

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