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Nolan Lawson

@flaki asked me for this, so here's a short guide on scaling Mastodon *down*: gist.github.com/nolanlawson/fc

Note that I'm not a Ruby/Sidekiq expert and probably don't know what I'm talking about. But these tips worked for me.

10 Nov 2022 at 11:42 | Open on toot.cafe
7 comments | Expand all CWs
Marcos
Your toot motivated me to look into S3 pricing and holy cow ~40GB for 1$/month. I've got to look into it asap
10 Nov 2022 at 11:54 | Open on micro.guedes.com.pt
Ricard Torres

@nolan Thank you for sharing this, Nolan!

I haven't felt the Sidekiq memory leak in my single-user instance yet but I'll add the auto restart regardless.

10 Nov 2022 at 12:02 | Open on ricard.social
Nolan Lawson

@ricard If you haven't hit your memory ceiling, then I'd say don't bother. You'd know: e.g. my server would consistently crash like ~1 time per week, because Sidekiq's memory would slowly creep up until it hit the limit.

10 Nov 2022 at 12:03 | Open on toot.cafe
Ricard Torres

@nolan The worst part so far is disk space for cache on remote media, avatars and headers.

Avatars and headers seem to never get purged, it just keeps on filling up 🙄

I ended up doing a bash script to replace all header files with a 1x1 pixel to save space. As I don't really care for user headers.

10 Nov 2022 at 12:05 | Open on ricard.social
Doug Holton

@nolan @flaki Forgive the naive question, it's just out of curiosity, but would it be bad advice to run a small site off a cheap VPS server that also had 4gb RAM? Or I don't know if lighter weight alternatives to Mastodon are preferable (not sure which one). Ruby on Rails seems so heavy. Even the popular Canvas LMS built w/it disables search & other features probably because of costs and load.
Appreciate your work on Pinafore, Pouchdb, etc.!

10 Nov 2022 at 13:01 | Open on mastodon.social
Nolan Lawson

@dougholton I've heard that Pleroma is way lighter on resources than Mastodon, but I haven't tried it out myself.

10 Nov 2022 at 13:04 | Open on toot.cafe
Marcos
I'm running Pleroma and it's built in Elixir, which is considered a spiritual sucessor of Ruby on Rails (There's more in-depth explanations on the web but I considered this article to be very good due to its historical and technical comparisons https://curiosum.com/blog/elixir-vs-ruby-comparison).

4GB seems fine for Pleroma. My VPS has 1 core and 1GB RAM, running ubuntu server. It looks like Pleroma uses ~700MB which is pretty good but I didn't use Dockers and installed it manually, which sped things up. Mileage may vary as memory can RAMp up (pardon the pun) the more follows and followers you have.

A word of caution using Pleroma, as there's preconceptions attached to it. As far as I could gather during my search on the topic, most of its developers are “free speech absolutists” , which tend to cater to unsavory people, so there are admins who consider all Pleroma instances to be bad, regardless of its users, and tend to block them. I don't want to bore you, there's extra info on my introduction. I found this mostly from word of mouth and reactions from people so I can't be of more help explaining the full problem.
I'm running Pleroma and it's built in Elixir, which is considered a spiritual sucessor of Ruby on Rails (There's more in-depth explanations on the web but I considered this article to be very good due to its historical and technical comparisons https://curiosum.com/blog/elixir-vs-ruby-comparison).
10 Nov 2022 at 13:38 | Open on micro.guedes.com.pt
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