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What is the long-term storage plan for Lemmy instances? (lemmy.world)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months 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 74 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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

[-] krogoth@lemmy.sdf.org 16 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I'm not really sure that a K/V service is a more scalable option than Postgres for storing text posts and the like. If you're not performing complex queries or requiring microsecond latencies then Postgres doesn't require that much compute or memory.

People can get unnecessary scared of relational databases if they've had bad experiences with databases that are used poorly, but attempting to force relational data into a K/V can lead to the application layer essentially just doing a less efficient job of the same types of queries that the database would normally handle. Maybe there'll be some future need to offload post and comment bodies into object storage or something but that seems incredibly premature.

Object storage for pictrs is definitely a fantastic addition, though.

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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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