Mastodawn

Kalcifer Jul 11, 2023

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

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?

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ubergeek77 Jul 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.

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Lodion 🇦🇺Jul 11, 2023

The largest table holds data that is only needed by Lemmy briefly. There is a scheduled job to clear it… Every 6 months. There are active discussions on how best to handle this.

On my instance I’ve set a cronjob to delete everything but the most recent 100k rows of that table every hour.

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ubergeek77

I saw that issue, and then I saw people having problems after clearing it, so I’m just going to wait until they figure that out in a stable version. Looking forward to it though!