We’ve posted a number of times about our increasing storage issues. We’re currently at the cusp of using 80% of the 25gb we have available in the current tier for the online service we run this instance on. This has caused some issues with the server crashing in recent days.

We’ve been monitoring and reporting on this progress occasionally, including support requests and comments on the main lemmy instance. Of particular note, it seems that pictures tend to be the culprit when it comes to storage issues.

The last time a discussion around pict-rs came up, the following comment stuck out to me as a potential solution

Storage requirements depend entirely on the amount of images that users upload. In case of slrpnk.net, there are currently 1.6 GB of pictrs data. You can also use s3 storage, or something like sshfs to mount remote storage.

Is there anyone around who is technically proficient enough to help guide us through potential solutions using “something like sshfs” to mount remote storage? As it currently exists, our only feasible option seems to be upgrading from $6/month to $12/month to double our current storage capacity (25GB -> 50 GB) which seems like an undesirable solution.

  • Hi, is this still an issue? I could help but I might need a bit more details than what you’re providing here. For instance, are you using any specific cloud provider? Depending on what you’re using there might be different solutions (e.g. a separate volume that can be attached to your VM).

    There are also other options besides paying for an actual external volume or increasing your VM size. For example if you’re on Azure you can use blobfuse to mount a “storage account container” as if it were a drive. If you’re on AWS there’s a similar project called s3fs-fuse which pretty much accomplishes the same thing.

    • This got posted to technology sub as well and someone posted a link to sshfs and we might look into utilizing that plus block storage to resolve. For now we’ve trimmed logs again, purged some old info, and are hopefully waiting on an update to pict-rs to resolve. If we run into any troubles I’ll definitely look into reaching out to you, thank you for offering.