Apparently, 128 GBs isn't enough to host a Mastodon Server

Tue Oct 08 2024


So yeah, it finally happened.

My personal Mastodon server has filled up all 128 GB of storage.

It's been just 4 weeks since I made the migration from my web server because of the low storage space it had. And before migration it only used about 10 GB space.

After I migrated it over to virtual server with 128 GB of storage, I disabled all the media limitations I had. Because using Mastodon without media was no different than browsing web without Javascript.

And that led to filling up the storage space just in 2 weeks.

When that happened, I used Mastodon's built-in tootctl tool to remove all the media cache stored on the server, but this wasn't the complete solution. Because cleaning that cache only releases around 10 to 20 GB and I believe it's not enough for a Mastodon server.

So I decided to bump the storage space for the Mastodon server from 128 GB to 256 GB and created 2 different Systemd timers to remove the cache in every hour and another one to delete the entire media storage and fetch it again in every 2 weeks.

Now it's been 2 weeks and everything goes great so far. Timers and scripts I created works great and after the last media refetching which happened exactly 2 days ago, server storage usage has down to 40 GB and came back to around 110 GB.

I haven't given much detail on this post because I'm currently working on a guide on how you can setup your own Mastodon server from scratch, and I'll share all my experiences and scripts over there. But you need to wait a bit. Because posts doesn't write themselves lol.

Thanks for checking out, see you all in the next one!

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Thank You!

08.10.2024 - 69/100