I’m running a small instance just for myself and a friend. We basically use it to access the Lemmy fediverse.

I was under the impression that our instance would not download imagery that was not hosted on it but the pict-rs “files” directory ended up with 45 gig of data which ultimately filled up the VPS storage space.

Is there a command that I can automate to prune this regularly or does anyone have a solution?

  • poVoq@slrpnk.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    1 year ago

    Sadly not yet. Hopefully this will be improved in the future.

    However, this sounds like you used one of these follow everything bots, which is just a bad idea as it results in these kind of issues.

    • calr0x@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      I did but “all” is useless without it and having to use a separate website to discover communities just doesn’t make sense.

      I think at some point I will figure something out.

  • HousePanther@lemmy.goblackcat.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I just took a look at the repository for pict-rs and unfortunately nothing in the official docs about cleaning up images. Did you happen to use a bot to assist you in finding communities? If so this might be the reason. After two weeks of running, my image size is only 2.2mb. I should also ask you what the size of your database is. The activity table can get awfully big and very quickly.

  • RunAwayFrog
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    Imagine if media in Lemmy was all hosted in a distributed network filesystem like Iroh, where instances only function as inserters and exit nodes for that media.

    This way, smaller instances can have a smaller cache corresponding to the media that was actually needed by it (recently). And independent peers can help by participating in the distributed file-system network without running instances themselves.

  • Ocelot@lemmies.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    It would definitely be nice to have some image retention policy. If an image hasnt been accessed in say 6 months its probably safe to say I won’t care about it. And if need be it can pull it from the original server again.

  • Pleonasm@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Can you just run a cronjob to delete files in that directory every day?

    (Maybe there’s a reason you can’t do this, I don’t know how Lemmy instance works)