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?

Show thread

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.

Show thread

𝓢𝓮𝓮𝓙𝓪𝔂𝓔𝓶𝓶

I’m in a similar boat and I’m gaining about 300 MB/day on my small instance doesn’t yet have any local communities.