For those self-hosting a lemmy instance, what hardware are you using? I am currently using a small Hetzner VPS. It has 2 vCPU, 2GB RAM and 40GB SSD storage. My instance is currently just in testing with me as the only user, but I plan to use it for close friends or family that may want to try this out, but might not want to sign up for a different instance. My CPU and RAM usage is great so far. My only concern is how large the storage will balloon to over time. I’ve been up for ~20 hours and it’s grown to 1.5G total volume since.
From what I’ve heard (take this with a huge grain of salt) is that the posts themselves shouldn’t take up much of your storage. The biggest thing that could take up your storage are images, but they are only stored on the instances where the community in which they were posted in is.
Do you have any suggestions for what the 1.5GB is then?
It’s likely the Docker images, and maybe the Docker build cache if they built from source instead of using the Docker Hub image.
I’ve been up for about a day longer than OP, and my Lemmy data is still under 800MB. OP either included non Lemmy data in that math, or is subscribed to way more communities than me. My storage usage has been growing much faster today with all the extra activity, but I won’t have to worry about storage space for about a month even at this rate.
And that’s assuming Lemmy doesn’t automatically prune old data. I’m not sure if it does or not. But if it doesn’t, I imagine I’ll see posts in about 2-3 weeks talking about Lemmy’s storage needs and how to manage it as an instance admin.
EDIT: Turns out ~90% of my Lemmy data is just for debugging and not needed:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3103#issuecomment-1631643416
I used the ansible route to get going. I am subbed to ~150 communities currently. Some of those won’t stay, but for now I am subbing to almost anything to see how that affects disk usage. I am interested to see how, or if, it levels off over time and what a week or two out looks like. I expect by then we will all have many more tips for each other as we trial and error our way through.
Here’s my current usage:
Ahhhh, image posts are where your usage is going! Makes sense, my instance is just for my account and I don’t submit anything. Your postgres size is more or less in line with where mine was at your uptime. I’m using Docker Compose so I’m only considering the size of the volumes in my metrics, not the image sizes or anything.
EDIT: Turns out I accidentally firewalled my
pictrsservice, it couldn’t reach external sites to create thumbnails for external links. That’s why my storage usage was so much lower. Whoops.Yeah, images are where the main bulk of the storage is going. Interestingly, my instance is also just for my account presently and I have not submitted any images until my screenshot above. So these images are just those that are being pulled from other instances. I was under the impression that images were hosted from their respective instance and not saved locally, so I am curious to see how this plays out long term.
Thumbnails are stored locally, I believe.
Confirmed. Investigated that earlier.
I’m running it on an LXC container that lives on a proxmox cluster.
2 vCPU at 2.6Ghz. 2GB of RAM (it’s LXC so I can allocate more if needed…) and 40GB of SSD-backed CEPH storage. I actually just upped this to 150GB because I can see the velocity of data I’m storing for this. I have about 2 more TB of storage on the CEPH cluster before I need to order a few more SSDs.
I have terrible internet, but I do have a static address. And they’re installing fiber in my neighborhood right now. So that will change soon too.
Based on what I’ve seen thus-far, I suspect I can handle about a hundred users on this without much issue.
- 1 vCPU 2.9ghz
- 1 GB DDR4 Memory
- 25 GB NVMe/SSD Storage
5~ USD a month. Working great for personal use and I’d imagine a handful of users. Hosted in a data center that is very close to me.
Also fwiw: 4 days of lemmy. I am subbed to a bunch of stuff. I’ve only uploaded like three pictures to my instance… All that space is thumbnails from other instances.
692M ./postgres 8.0K ./lemmy-ui 499M ./pictrs 1.2G . 1.2G total
There’s my current disk usage. I’ve gone wild subscribing to just about every community I come across to see how the storage adds up. Right now I’ve got ~150 communities subbed. We’ll see how it goes and when I’ll need to expand the storage.
I’m using a Ramnode VPS since I had some unused credit I wanted to use up. 2 vcpu, 1 GB ram, and 35 GB ssd.
Seems to be working well enough so far, but right now it’s just me. If I open up to more users, I might need to upgrade, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
Edit: I may have spoke too soon; had to reboot the server due to low memory. Hopefully a swap file will alleviate that a bit, but I might have to upgrade the RAM on this server. We’ll see.
