What are the hardware requirements for hosting a Lemmy instance for a single account?
I'm interested in possibly hosting my own Lemmy instance - just for my own account. I was thinking of hosting it on Raspberry Pi (possibly the 1GB Pi 4 B), but I couldn't find much for definitive information on what the hardware requirements would be for such an instance to know if this is even possible. How much storage is required? Is the Pi 4 CPU powerful enough? How much memory?
My biggest concern with hosting it on a Pi is storage. SD cards are not made for write-heavy applications like Lemmy. If you want to host it on a Pi, I suggest adding a real hard drive over USB and configure Lemmy to use that for storage.
Pi4 is powerful enough, barely. 1GB is too low, is there a 1GB Pi4? Thought it was 2GB min? Think recommendation is 4GB min, 8 better.
Storage is the real issue, it takes a lot a day, but it's all based on unique communities subscribed on the server, so if you have 4 accounts all looking at the same 8 communities it's the same as 1 guy looking at those 8 communities.
4GB/day for a lot of communities, obviously less for less.
On my $5 linode server with 1 gigabyte of ram and 1 CPU core, it runs okay. Storage will be my biggest issue, swap is always full, and memory usage is about 70%
I’m not sure if it’s still valid, but Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) had a 4 vCPU, 24 GB RAM, 200 GB HDD free tier. No costs, ever! You could sign up there and setup an even bigger instance.
If you, as the sole user, are not subscribing to dozens if not hundreds of communities, 1GB should be barely okay. As others have pointed out, it is storage that requires more attention with a Pi 4B.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but this feels like a flaw with how Lemmy (perhaps other fediverse apps as well, I'm not sure) is designed. Why do I need to store all posts made to a community that one of the users on my instance subscribes to? Would it not be better to simply store my user's posts, and comments, and the posts made to any communities hosted on my instance? Why do I need to store information from other instances, and users?
It's caching posts from other servers so that if you have an instance with a few hundred or thousand people on it and they all open the home page you don't send out thousands of requests for each post and end up DDOSing a bunch of other servers.
I've got a Vultr VPS with 1GB of ram with just Lemmy and a reverse proxy. RAM usage is right below 50% most of the time. I never looked when I first spun it up, so no idea how quickly usage is going up, or if it is going up at all.