As you might have noticed, we’ve been experiencing repeated crashes and downtimes for the last 12 hours or so. This was because, after four long and tireless months, our storage drive had finally filled its 50GB capacity.
I noticed this today, at around 9:00 UTC and quickly took action. Fortunately we had already prepared a different partition with an additional 15GB ready for situations of this kind. It took me some additional 40 minutes of tinkering to move the database to said partition, but after that the instance was back online without any majour issues.
This is our current storage breakdown:
-
Secondary partition (currently: 10 GB; max capacity: 15GB)
- Database (postgres): 10GB
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Main partition (currently: 38GB; max capacity: 50GB)
- Image hosting (pict-rs): 23GB
- Lemmy executables, other services (Kaleidoscope, AutoMod, Flair) and operating system: 15GB
Of these, the only ones expected to grow are the database and the image hosting, with the latter being by far the fastest growing.
In the future we are considering moving pict-rs to a separate, more cost effective storage, however for the time being this should hold. We apologize for the disservice in the last hours.
Cheers and stay Based!
a different comment but it seems like text-only federation scales easier (not very helpful to think of for this instance which is often based on meme sharing I’d guess)
Not too sure about that. A good chunk of all the images that end up filling our image hosting are cached images from other instances that reach us through federation. All images from all comunities on other instances that have at least one of our users subscribed to them get cached by the image host. Month after month, it fills up quite rapidly.
So the only solution to that would be either not federating at all, or doing so only with text-only communities. Of course none of these are really feasible.
if it wasn’t clear this is basically what I meant, no images at all, even from other instances; it would require a kind of change of software perhaps (I am suggesting a totally different “low tech” social medium setup). Text is much more sustainable than images or sound, which is more sustainable than video
Ah got it. No, I didn’t undestand your point.
Yeah it would be an interesting medium but radically different from what we currently have. And it simply wouldn’t be a good social media, compared to the “competition”, text-only means very little user engagement. Pretty sure the average user would look at maybe two or three posts, then get bored and move to Instagram. Or worse, TikTok.