Just started self hosting this instance. Nothing on the docs mentioned anything about storage considerations.

  • Ruud@lemmy.worldM
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    1 year ago

    This is lemmy.world after 4 weeks:

    58G	pictrs
    34G	postgres
    
      • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
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        1 year ago

        im running 50 users right now, subbed to A LOT of communities, seeing db growth of about 100mb per day.

          • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li
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            1 year ago

            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

            • Pleonasm@programming.dev
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              1 year ago

              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?

              • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li
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                1 year ago

                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…

                • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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                  1 year 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.

                • ipkpjersi@lemmy.one
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                  1 year ago

                  Ooh, that’s a really good idea, I need a federation helper bot/account when I start self-hosting a Lemmy instance!

            • Alexander Kehr@lemmy.alexware.systems
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              1 year ago

              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

              • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li
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                1 year 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.

              • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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                1 year 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.

          • ChickenBoo@lemmy.jnks.xyz
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            1 year ago

            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.

      • Dran@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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

        • msinfo32
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          1 year ago

          wondering this also! wouldnt it require a domain for your account though?

    • HappyHam@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Now I wonder how viable it would be to support video hosting. The answer is almost certainly “God no!”

      • BigWigglyStyle@lemmynsfw.com
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        1 year 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.

    • lightrush@lemmy.ca
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      1 year 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.

    • holycrap@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Molecular0079@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • punio7@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • Kayn@dormi.zone
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        1 year ago

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

  • key@lemmy.keychat.org
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    1 year ago

    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 for now unless you get quite big. My instance is just me and I just threw my PG volume into a tgz to move servers and it’s less than a gig after a month ish.

    • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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      1 year ago

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

  • Tugg@lemmyverse.org
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    1 year ago

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

    pictrs   930M
    postgres 1.4G
    
  • holycrap@lemmy.world
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    1 year 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.

  • hitagi@ani.social
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    1 year 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.

  • Kayn@dormi.zone
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    1 year 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:

    • 4.9 GiB pictrs
    • 6.2 GiB postgres

    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.