Mastodon what we learned by installing the app

The following we noticed it before we read it in a forum or in its docs s. The issue has just now slowly started to appear in the few forums I frequent.

mastodon elephant

Well before installing Mastodon you should make sure you have PLENTY of space on your VPS if you want to use it.

My impression from my experience in web applications is that we use VPS with high RAM and not necessarily huge storage spaces.

Installing Mastodon changed my mind. At first it needed 1 GB of RAM and just 10 GB of space. But as I connected to more and more federation relays… the RAM and storage requirement skyrocketed.
After 2 days with 10 and 6 connected federation relays I needed 2 GB of RAM and 40 GB on disk.

Even the presence of a single user consumes a lot of resources because there are federation relays that open the doors to too much data. If I wasn't connected to federation relays, and if I only posted for myself it doesn't make sense because users would find us much harder. But then the server would probably need less than one GB of RAM and around 20 GB of space for data.

Of course it wouldn't hurt to mention somewhere in the docs (or maybe even during the installation process) that once you (and other users) start following a few people with federation relays enabled, Mastodon will quickly start taking up a LOT of space.

Of course there are solutions with scheduled tasks that delete files, but I don't want to imagine what might happen if users only reach 10.000. How much will be the data and how much RAM will be needed for the daily their.

I should mention that for server backups I used a bucket in Digital Ocean (Spaces) and in three days it had reached 150GB. No thanks.

I haven't looked into the RAM side yet, because I just noticed that the on the disk was exhausted I first removed all the federation relays and later the Mastodon itself.

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Written by giorgos

George still wonders what he's doing here ...

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