this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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[Question] Disk Space for Lemmy and Mastodon instances (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by Solvena@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hi, I'm new with self-hosting but managed to set up my own Lemmy and Mastodon instances on a VPS recently. However, I ran into an issue with disk space quite rapidly (which I had way too few, because I started with the cheapest, smallest package for my VPS).

Now I prepare a new setup, where I'll be able to dynamically scale disk space as needed, but this can get expensive quickly. Therefor my question: How much disk space do I typically need for private (1-3 user) instances of Lemmy and Mastodon? Are there settings, where I can limit the disk space utilization (at the cost of older stored content being overwritten)?

I would be fine with needing up to like 30-40 GB, but any more than that would be getting kinda expensive ....

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[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That will depend on usage. If you subscribe to a lot of communities that are very active the database will grow fairly fast. If your users post a ton of large files then that will grow much much faster than the database. Your instance also caches image thumbnails so that can grow somewhat fast too.

Currently sitting at 750 MB for pictrs and 500MB for postgres after a week, so you may want to plan a decent size but 30-40GB should be fine for a while to get started. Add some monitoring for when it reaches 10, 20 and 30GB and keep an eye on it.

[–] Baku@aussie.zone 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Heya, sorry for the necropost, but would you mind sharing how you're doing on storage these days? I'm looking at spinning up a Lemmy instance of my own and I'm curious about the storage aspect on small instances

[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 2 points 5 months ago (1 children) 
25G     pictrs
13G     postgres
38G     total

Seems fairly reasonable to me

[–] Baku@aussie.zone 1 points 5 months ago

Thanks!

[–] TX@nadajnik.org 2 points 1 year ago

@Solvena my kbin instance is using 37 GB right now, and it is one of the oldest instances. I don't have many user thou.

[–] ruud@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you need Mastodon, or can it be something similar? Mastodon does a lot of caching. For my single-user instance I run Akkoma, which is very leight-weight and has all (even more) features Mastodon has.

[–] ruud@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

By the way this is Media disk usage for my Mastodon instance, but it's not really small ;-)

[–] bev@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I appreciate the work you do. However, is this sustainable for the long term?

[–] void_wanderer@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So, how much do you spend, why are you doing it, and do you get any funding or paying this or of your pocket? (just trying to understand how the fediverse works)

[–] seang96@spgrn.com 2 points 1 year ago

If this helps storage is cheap. See this for deals on high capacity drives https://shucks.top/

[–] aU5ern4me@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No expert here but usualy you use an external object storage (should be configurable in lemmy via pict-rs) which should be cheaper then VPS storage ^^

Maybe have a look into it.

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 1 points 1 year ago

My Lemmy instance is using 3GB and it has 100 users.

[–] green_dot@le.fduck.net 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I have my lemmy instance currently using about 2 GB space, I'm going to set up Mastadon this weekend I hope. There are cheap smaller dedicated servers from kimsufi for like $10 with 1/2 TB HDD.

Also Hetzner cloud has compute and disk separated, so you can scale one or the other.

I've got a 500GBSSD box from Hetzner, but I'm also hosting other things there and dropped VMs from Linode I had previously and consolidated there.

You could use object storage, like s3 or wasabi, for lemmy picture/media storage, if that's eating up most space. "cloud" providers are bit bananas when you need more disk, at one point its cheaper to go down a dedicated route. Depends on your budget..

Edit: Others might chime in with a better answer, at the moment bot sure what your budget is, so its bit of assumptions from my side.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 0 points 1 year ago

With Lemmy, it will depend more on the amount of media that your users upload than anything. With Mastodon, you also will have to consider the amount of data in the cache.

With Mastodon, I have (small) instances running for about an year or so which are using less than 100GB, and I have instances from power users that went on to take ~250GB in less than a month.

You can set up Mastodon to delete posts after a certain age and to clear the remote cache periodically. This would help mitigate both things.