Just started self hosting this instance. Nothing on the docs mentioned anything about storage considerations.
My instance has 13 users, and has been up for 2 months now:
1.5G ./pictrs 3.4G ./postgresDepends. 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
476M ./postgres 1.1G ./pictrs
After 3 weeks
How many users?
This is my small instance with way fewer users than lemmy.world.
11G pictrs 5.2G postgresOut 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
Thanks for the script!
I didn’t make it! :) I think, @fmstrat@nowsci.com made it.
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.
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 1.4Glol 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)
After hosting my own instance with just me for ca. 2 weeks:
1.99Gi pictrs
5.21Gi postgres
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.
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 unsustainable. Why do you think the mainstream platforms are selling out?
It’s really not, at least for the text part. Text posts and comments take almost nothing and storage continues to get cheaper.
Mainstream platforms are selling out because they’ve always had others and shareholders who ultimately want to make money.
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.
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.
This is lemmy.world after 4 weeks:
58G pictrs 34G postgresWow, that is surprisingly not bad given the size of the instance!
Yeah lemmy seems to use just about nothing for data storage.
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 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.
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 postgresedit: I may have a slight
RedditLemmy problemDo 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.
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!
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.
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
wondering this also! wouldnt it require a domain for your account though?
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.
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
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.
Honestly, Less than I thought!
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.
How many
cans-of-beans.jpgcan you store?At least 3. Maybe 4.
Removed by mod
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.
