Hi all, a shout-out for assistance. I’m considering hosting a Lemmy instance (assuming I can pass the wife test on costs) and I’m looking for some guidance on specs.
Can anyone who’s currently hosting an instance (or who knows the inner workings of one) please reply with:
- specs on the hardware / VPS that’s hosting your instance
- how many users / posts that’s supporting
- what the system load looks like with the above
- if locally hosting, the type of bandwidth requirements you’re seeing
I previously posted this in the wrong community, and one of the responses asked how many users I’m expecting. To preemptively answer - I don’t know. I’m just trying to get an idea of relative sizing.
Thank you!!
Myself i’m running a instance for two people in a pretty small lxc container on my home server- 1vCore, 512MB of ram and 8GB storage. Currently it utilize around 5% of CPU, ~250MB of ram (+260MB of swap), and ~2GB of storage (nearly 50/50 picts/postgres), in terms of network traffic i see average of 20kb/s, depends how many communities are you subscribed for.
My homeserver is running on i3-4150, 16GB ram and a couple of ssds, using Proxmox VE as hypervisor
edit: typo
Huh, proxmox on a i3-4130? That doesn’t choke on cpu? TBF, I’m assuming you’re running several other VMs. Also, why not docker?
Proxmox itself is pretty lightweight, and yes, i’m also running other VMs and LXC containers (not much, about 9 containers with some lite services like teamspeak server, couple of bots, deluge and hestiacp, prometheus, k3s for testing and “vdi” in vm). Actually - i’m running docker - inside LXC containers. Not the prettiest way to do it, but it works fine
Fair enough. There are no rules for homelab; do what you want!
Out of curiosity, are you running a repurposed 1L OEM box? I’ve picked up a handful of those for dirt cheap, and they’re kinda fun to play around with!
Close enough! I’m using a HP z230 SFF, not as small as those 1L USFF, but pretty practical for a small homeserver, have a couple of PCI-E slots to expand, can hold 2x HDD (if you count replacing 5,25 optical drive with a tray) or multiple SSD wherever they fit. Pretty happy with this build, day-to-day it draws about ~18-50W from the wall, depends on load.
not the one you were replying to, but I’m 2/3 thru switching my servers over to the 1L form factor and am liking it. it’s amazing how much compute can be crammed into a tiny space these days.
How are you routing it to the internet?
I use nginx proxy manager to route all my services. Just forward 80 and 443 from my router to that.
I’m using hestiacp to host some websites anyway, so i just added a new nginx template to create reverse proxy to lemmy+lemmy_ui containers
I really want to figure out if it’s possible to stick it behind cloudflare or something. I would rather not expose any IP address directly to the internet. I’m leaning on just setting up a reverse proxy on a cheap cloud instance back to my home.
My instance is actually behind cloudflare and it works fine, but remember that it would be possible to “expose” ip of your server due to federation, as your server will talk to other server (directly, that traffic won’t go over cloudflare), so if you are paranoid about that, i would recommend setting up a wireguard tunnel to cloud instance, and forwarding the traffic that way, or just setup the lemmy on that instance
Thanks that’s kind of what I was thinking. Have you used cloudflared before?
No, i didn’t, but i think it should also work over cloudflared