This is lemmy.world after 4 weeks:
58G pictrs
34G postgres
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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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...
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
And only active subs. And even then, it's just text and tiny thumbnails.
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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Now I wonder how viable it would be to support video hosting. The answer is almost certainly "God no!"
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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.
Wow, that is surprisingly not bad given the size of the instance!
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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
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
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
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