KalciferJul 11, 2023

What is the long-term storage plan for Lemmy instances?

https://lemmy.world/post/1334724

What is the long-term storage plan for Lemmy instances? - LemmyWorld

Over time, Lemmy instances are going to keep aquiring more, and more data. Even if, in the best case, they are not caching content and they are just storing the data posted to communities local to the server, there will still be a virtually limitless growth in server storage requirements. Eventually, it may get to a point where it is no longer economically feesible to host all of the infrastructure to keep expanding the server’s storage. What happens at this point? Will servers begin to periodically purge old content? I have concerns that there will be a permanent horizon (as Lemmy becomes more popular, the rate of growth in storage requirements will also increase, thereby reducing the distance to this horizon) over which old – and still very useful – data will cease to exist. Is there any plan to archive this old data?

Show threadubergeek77Jul 11, 2023

Pictrs 0.4 recently added support for object storage. This is fantastic, because object storage is dirt cheap compared to traditional block storage (like a VM filesystem).

I know Lemmy uses Postgres, but they should really invest time into moving towards something more sustainable for long term/permanent hosting. Paid Postgres services are obscenely upcharged and prohibitively expensive, so that’s not an option.

It’s difficult to run a DB off object storage, but letting Lemmy use SQLite instead would be amazing. If Lemmy supported SQLite, everyone could use Cloudflare R2, which is dirt cheap and doesn’t have egress fees.

Couple that with Pictrs supporting object storage, and the major instances could be saving hundreds of dollars a month off block storage fees alone.

Show threadteolanJul 11, 2023

The 700MB are the postgres data or everything including the images?

I’m under the impression that text should be very cheap to store inside postgres.

Show threadcestvrai

Keep in mind that you are also storing metadata for the post (i.e. creation time), relations (i.e. which used posted) and an index.

Might not be much now but these things really add up over the years.

Jul 11, 2023 at 9:21amWeb
Show threadteolanJul 14, 2023

Yes but those are in general a couple of bytes at most. The average comment will be less than 1KB. Metadata that goes with it will be barely more.

On the other hand most images will be around 1MB, or 1000x times larger. Sure it depends on the type of instance but text should be a long way from filling a hard drive. From what I’ve seen on github the database size is actually mostly debugging information, so it might explain the weirdness.

Configurable Activity Cleanup Duration · Issue #3103 · LemmyNet/lemmy

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