Lemmy

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What is the long-term storage plan for Lemmy instances? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Kalcifer@lemmy.world to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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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@lemmy.ubergeek77.chat 60 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (27 children)

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). This helps a lot for image storage, which is a large part of the problem, but it's not the whole problem.

I know Lemmy uses Postgres for everything else, 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.

I'm armchair architecting here so I'm not sure what that would look like for Lemmy (Cloudflare KV? Redis?)

Still, even my own private instance has been growing at a rate of about 700MB per day, and I don't even subscribe to that many things. I can't imagine what the major instances are dealing with. This isn't sustainable unless we want to start purging old data, which will kill Lemmy long term.

EDIT: Turns out ~90% of my Lemmy data is just for debugging and not needed:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3103#issuecomment-1631643416

[–] Legarth@lemmy.fmhy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Isn't it mostly pictures and movies taking up space, posts and comments that is just text doesn't take up much.

I would be fine with text is forever but pictures and movies are deleted after time.

[–] freeskier@centennialstate.social 4 points 1 year ago

For large instances pictures is probably the bigger consumer of space, but for small instances the database size is the bigger issue because of federation. Also, mass storage for media is cheap, fast storage for databases is not. With my host I can get 1TB of object storage for $5 a month. Attached NVMe storage is $1 per month per 10 GB.

For my small instance the database is almost 4x as large as pictrs, and growing fast.

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