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] 277 points 2 years ago (8 children)

This is lemmy.world after 4 weeks:

58G	pictrs
34G	postgres
[–] [email protected] 78 points 2 years 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] 57 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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] 18 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 67 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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] 9 points 2 years 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] 16 points 2 years ago (3 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 2 years 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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years 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] 13 points 2 years 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 2 years 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] 23 points 2 years 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 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years 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] 19 points 2 years 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 2 years ago

Honestly, Less than I thought!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Interesting, I thought it would be waaayyy more

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years 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] 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago

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

[–] lightrush 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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

11G	pictrs
5.2G	postgres
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years 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] 4 points 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years 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] 14 points 2 years 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] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years 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] 29 points 2 years ago

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

1.5G    ./pictrs
3.4G    ./postgres
[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Is there any way to purge old data?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 years 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] 23 points 2 years 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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Are you planning on donating to instances that don't purge old data?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago (1 children)

476M ./postgres 1.1G ./pictrs

After 3 weeks

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

How many users?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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 unless you get quite big. I just threw my PG volume into a tgz to move servers and it's less than a gig.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago

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

pictrs   930M
postgres 1.4G
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years 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 2 years ago (3 children)

it was because i set a damn server icon

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years 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 2 years 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] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

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

1.99Gi pictrs

5.21Gi postgres

[–] lightrush 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

At least 3. Maybe 4.

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