Hi all, a shout-out for assistance. I’m considering hosting a Lemmy instance (assuming I can pass the wife test on costs) and I’m looking for some guidance on specs.

Can anyone who’s currently hosting an instance (or who knows the inner workings of one) please reply with:

  • specs on the hardware / VPS that’s hosting your instance
  • how many users / posts that’s supporting
  • what the system load looks like with the above
  • if locally hosting, the type of bandwidth requirements you’re seeing

I previously posted this in the wrong community, and one of the responses asked how many users I’m expecting. To preemptively answer - I don’t know. I’m just trying to get an idea of relative sizing.

Thank you!!

  • terribleplanEnglish
    11•1 year ago

    To answer what I think you are getting at lemmy scales based on two things:

    1. Database size (and write volume) scales mostly on what communities are being federated to you. Unless you are .world the volume of remote content is going to massively outweigh local content. On my (mostly) single-user instance I have found this to be the same with Pictrs as well, as it is mostly eating storage to store federated thumbnails.
    2. Database read load scales mostly on the number of users you have. For a single-user instance this is pretty minimal. For an instance like .world (with thousands of users) I imagine it is significant and for such an instance you would look at scaling postgres to have read-only replicas to handle the load.

    ~18 hours ago I wrote

    My instance has been running for 23 days, and I am pretty much the only active local user:

    7.3G    pictrs
5.3G    postgres

    I may have a slight Reddit Lemmy problem

    As of right now

    7.5G    pictrs
5.7G    postgres

    So my storage is currently growing at around 1G per day, though pictrs is mostly cached thumbnails so that should mostly level out at some point as the cache expires.

    To answer your stated question: I run a single user instance on a mini PC with 32G of RAM (using <2G including all lemmy things such as pg, pictrs, etc and any OS overhead) and a quad core i5-6500T (CPU load usually around 0.3). 32474 posts, 210065 comments. I don’t have good numbers for bandwidth, but my frp setup in general is using ~1Mb/s average or so for everything including Lemmy.

    You could probably easily run Lemmy on a Pi so long as you use an external drive for storage.