I ask generally out of curiosity. I was just thinking that as big social media fractures, old school isolated forums might become “cool again”, and that one of the achievements of lemmy might be as a nice platform for simply running a forum for whatever community you want all without needing to worry about federation.
If it turns out that work of federating data is a substantial part of the resource overhead, and that an isolated server would actually be quite efficient, that’d be quite a nice feather in the lemmy cap I’d say. Hexbear seems to have been using lemmy this way for a while and it seems to have been successful too.
I run a single user instance and I subscribe to 47 communities from 12 servers.
Most of the time I see 3 requests per second from the other servers.
I’m running on the cheapest Hetzner VPS with aditional storage, because the 20 GB are not enough for lemmy and the OS.
The load is most of the time at 0.2
Oh you went for the ARM CPU? I was looking at it but then I thought that there is no ARM docker container for lemmy, was I wrong?
The Lemmy Easy Deploy script available at GitHub supports Arm64 in theory. In practice, some required binary refused to run on my Pi 4 so I think it’s still a WIP.
How many communities do you subscribe to? I thin that is what will have the biggest impact on the database size.
I have ~160 users and have been up about two months. We have subscribers to pretty much every large community and hundreds of smaller ones, plus media heavy ones like the NSFW communities.
Currently sitting at 6.6GB for Postgres (there was an update recently that drastically reduced the size, dunno exactly what it was at before), 54GB on pictrs/media. (I host the media on object storage, specifically Cloudflare R2)
For memory I’m pushing 3GB now, with Postgres taking about 1.5GB. That’s higher than it used to be, might be related to the update that reduced the DB size.
CPU: I have a cheap 2 core x86 virtual server/vps - and haven’t seen it go over 10% during normal operations…
To answer your question directly though, the most work is OUTGOING federation. So it really depends on how active your communities are/how many unique instances subscribe.
Lemmy can certainly be used like an old school forum with federation disabled in the settings. The developers even made a phpBB-like front-end for it: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
On my instance, the owner said that just the cached text content is something like 25GB.
So it’s very storage intensive as it seems Lemmy doesn’t delete the cached content.
Some storage optimisation came in the latest version … it may have been to do with what you describe.
The main table that all the growth was in is now split and the cached federated content can be dropped with out much work, and there was talk of tuning it to expire at 3 months.
The content on no.lastname.nz (very small instance) is only about 10-15GB including cached images
