Does ActivityPub send those to other instances, or does ActivityPub only send the original post and the rest (upvotes, downvotes, replies) are stored only on the original server where the post was made?
haven’t worked with AP yet, but as a webdev I’m certain it’s original server only. Syncing upvotes between nodes would be an insane datavolume and one hell to properly keep in sync to begin with.
Yeah. A lot of hand-wringing has gone on about it, e.g. https://gist.github.com/jdarcy/60107fe4e653819138396257df302eef. I’ll post this and then show you a video of server activity that results.
My instance has 800 users, is 4 months old, and the database only is over 30GB. It is an insane amount of data.
I’m a bad example. I haven’t properly tuned the settings, currently RAM will grow to whatever is available.
I’m very lucky, the instance is running in a proxmox container alongside some other fediverse servers (run by others), on dedicated hardware in a datacentre. The sysadmin has basically thrown me plenty of spare resources since the other containers aren’t using them and RAM not used is wasted, so I’ve got 32GB allocated currently. I still need to restart once a week or that RAM gets used up and the database container crashes.
It’s been on my list of things to do for a while, try some different postgres configs, but I just haven’t got around to it.
I know a couple of months back lemmy.world were restarting every 30 mins so they didn’t use up all the RAM and crash. I presume some time and some lemmy updates later that’s no longer the case.
I know some smaller servers get away with 2gb of RAM, and we should be able to use a lot less than 32GB if I actually try to tune the postgres config.
There is a postgres command to show the size of each table. Most likely it is from activity tables which can be cleared out to save space.
After the second-to-last update the database shrunk and I was under the impression there was some automatic removal happening. Was this not the case?
It’s helpful info for others but personally I’m not that worried about the database size. The size of the pictrs cache is much more of a concern, and as I understand it there isn’t an easy way to identify and remove cache images without accidentally taking out user image uploads.
Thanks, that’s very informative. How does this work since ActivityPub can be used for other things, e.g., Mastodon? They ignore any “Type” entries that they don’t support?