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?

  • Lodion 🇦🇺
    link
    fedilink
    English
    61 year ago

    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.