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.
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.
if its only thumbnails and only impacting that local instance i presume you can just cron to clear out old thumbnails regularly if space is a huge issue.
It would be cool to hear back from you guys hosting in about a week or so, so see if it’ll just grow linearly, or if slows down at some point.
Sure, I’m curious too. I’ll keep an eye on the usage!
Here’s my use: https://thesimplecorner.org/comment/30599