I kind of want to self host a lemmy instance. What are the requirements for a single user lemmy instance?

  • mbirth@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    I did this for a while. However, after subscribing to several groups, there was constant disk activity and it ate network bandwidth. After two months I’ve stopped my server and went back to using a public instance.

    • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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      2 months ago

      Sure. It’s constantly pulling all the posts, comments and likes from potentially hundreds of instances and writing it to it’s database to make it accessible to you once you decide to open Lemmy. It’ll get updates from the network every few seconds (unless all the Americans are asleep) and that’ll cause some database operations on your side.

      Concerning the requirements: You’ll need some form of server, and probably a domain name. If you’re doing it at home, make sure you have a proper IP address and can forward ports. I run a Piefed instance, not Lemmy. It uses a few hundreds of megabytes of RAM and a bit of CPU and disk. It doesn’t cache media files as Lemmy does so I can’t comment on the storage size. It’s 3GB for me.

      • mbirth@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        I didn’t notice any big drops in network or CPU performance. Usually, because other network traffic had priority. But my server’s HDD constantly rattling along got me thinking that it wasn’t worth it. There are several other containers running on that box and I don’t have that much HDD activity with them.

        • seang96@spgrn.com
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          2 months ago

          There are postgres settings to reduce disk writes. There’s a max size and a timeout to write to disk. By default these values are on the lower end I believe.

          • mbirth@lemmy.ml
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            2 months ago

            Yeah, but I didn’t want to fiddle with some custom settings. The same official postgres container works great with other apps.

            • seang96@spgrn.com
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              2 months ago

              Yeah works good until its under load which federation does have. Matrix and Lemmy both got like 20GB of RAM dedicated to the database on my servers.