Hello everyone. I hope you're having/about to have an enjoyable weekend!
A quick update to let you all know the server had a significant upgrade yesterday. While you may notice things are a little more zippy, the need for added performance was definitely not the main driver for the upgrade. The main reason was the ever-increasing size of the database, which had left us dangerously close to a full disk!
Unfortunately, this means our monthly server costs have almost doubled, and while I haven't been open to accepting donations in the past, we have now passed a cost threshold where I feel it is appropriate. To this end, I have added a couple of donation options to the sidebar. Donate, don't donate, it's entirely up to you. I appreciate everyone's circumstances are different, and nothing is expected from you.
In other news, we also updated to the latest Lemmy 0.19.10 version yesterday. ๐
While this is a fairly minor update, with most development now focused on the next major version, it does introduce the ability to delete PMs along with other content when a user is banned, which is a major QoL improvement for admins. Importantly, it means no more manually deleting Nicole's flirtatious PMs from the database...
You can see changes and follow the discussion in the 0.19.10 thread.
Thanks! When you mention we were close to a full disk, what exactly do you mean? How much disk space and resources are used in an instance of this size?
We were down to about 4GB free on an 80GB VPS, but are now on a 160GB plan. Of the used space, about 50GB is the Lemmy and image databases, so they grow roughly 2.5GB each month.
wow, I that's a lot of growth. It's due to more users joining or something else, kinda the natural flow of things? For real how much my usage costs, makes me feel a little guilty lol.
also, do we have some mechanism to send old things that are not frequently accessed to some sort of cold storage? I image the live and actually used data is much less that the archive
Absolutely no need to feel guilty! The reality is that local users don't have a very big impact on database growth directly. It's just the nature of the federated model that means we need to store all received activity relating to all communities 'known' to this instance.
There is currently no mechanism in place to 'prune' old content from the database, but it has been considered. We may revisit the idea in the future.