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.
4vcpu (Ryzen), 8GB RAM, 256gb disk (which will be expanded when it gets to like 60% full). Not too worried about storage unless I get a bunch of image-happy users, text all comes in as json and goes straight to Postgres so it’s not a concern.
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.
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 have it running on my microk8s single node cluster. It’s a dual xeon (40 cores total) with unfortunately only 64gb ram. The motherboard’s max. I got a das with 72tb storage, currently in btrfs mirrored. Hoping btrfs raid-like configs become more usable in the future. I was using zfs but I always ran into issues.
shower thoughts… and still on my first cup of coffee to more just musing than anything …
if storage is the concern wonder if the lemmy roadmap might one day include an option to use cloud based storage?
azure storage at .06/gb per month is likely cheaper and more redundant than local storage - even if you factor in calls to the blob which could be lowered via caching.
cloud storage potentially might one day lead to a option for smaller self hosters to opt into a shared blob instance where the and cost is shared.
in this scenario security to ensure the cloud blob couldn’t be deleted would need to be thought through (maybe splitting the password among multiple admins with each having one part of the whole?) but might be one way to better encourage more self hosting for them compute side of things.
If I self hosted my own Lemmy on my home server, just for myself and I posted / uploaded images on it, when another user from another instance views my image, they cache it, would this mean later down the line if I deleted to free up server space, if someone else on that instance was to come across my image after deletion, because it was previously cached, the image would still show?
Wondering if rolling storage is possible eventually, where an archive of posts older than 2 years is performed and data deleted.
