I did a semi in-depth post on setting it all up here: https://reddthat.com/post/19103

To give you an idea of resources:

• 2 core
  • current usage: 20%
• 4g ram
  • current usage: 1.5-2gb

Database: 6.8gb Pictures: 13gb

We also use CloudFlare for CDN, as since the majority of connections was web sockets and POST requests it acts as a CDN for all our media.

141 active users, 667 users, 59 Communities, 530 Posts, 1.49K Comments

CPU and RAM are well below problem numbers and will continue to do so for these numbers.

The biggest problem for me is the picture files. Not only do you have to keep all the pictures your users upload, but also all the federated pictures as well! Probably the biggest challenge people that federate.

Since pictrs (since 0.4) now has object storage support, we can migrate to a S3 capable storage finally.
As we have only been online for 2 weeks… the database will grow fast, but object storage grows even faster!

• 2 weeks: 6gb
• 20 weeks: 60gb
• 60 weeks: 180gb

If the database gets that big every instance is going to have problems. The database in its current form has inefficiencies that the devs know about and are eventually working towards fixing.

Lemmy world posted what their server specs are, but they have had problems and scaled out their hardware because they knew they would keep their doors open.
https://lemmy.world/post/75556 - 32Core 128GB ram.
But IMHO it’s complete overkill. But it might not be for their database, considering they have 7.5k active users, which is 50x what I am dealing with.