I'm considering hosting an instance for personal and friend use. Have some questions.

Mautobu@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 14 points –

I'm just trying to gauge if the performance gain will be worth the additional effort and have some questions;

I've read that back end communication is relatively cheap compared to end user content presentation in Lemmy. So, that leads me to believe that if I host my own instance, even without any communities, it would present content from other instances to me faster and more reliably. Are these assumptions correct?

Does an instance do any content caching for other instances? Ie, if I browse asklemmy@lemmy.ml and someone else does the same, will my instance need to make new requests to lemmy.ml?

Are images caches from other instances?

Obviously if my instance goes down, there's no service. Is there some sort of high availability or clustering supported?

Are updates relatively straightforward on Docker? I assume just pull the new image and you're good to go, or are there usually database migrations to complete outside of that?

Thanks for reading!

12

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

Setup with docker is easy.

Performance is fantastic compared to the issues the most popular instances are having today.

Community syncing occurs in the background and is available to you through local instance. I don't know exactly how fast federated info syncs over, but seems reasonably fast in the last day I've played with it. For images, I think your client pulls the images from the original post link or original instance. Not really sure about that TBH.

HA is on you to set up.

Updates by docker should be easy moving to the latest image. However, there could be extra steps to update database structure. We'll have to see how that goes.

Yes I'm posting this through my own instance using wefwef app.

Thinking of the sync/federation speed. I saw your post here on !asklemmy@lemmy.ml maybe 10 mins after you posted it. So maybe the post synced over very quickly before I scrolled past it.

I had some trouble setting up with docker and getting everything to work. There is a setting that was not described, LEMMY_CORS_ORIGIN or something that needs to be set as a env var. Also make sure to have everything running with SSL.

And for initial federation your have to interact with your instance from the outside and give it some time.

That said, client speed is awesome now, no wait times for me.