I’m self hosting on Linode and am planning to add a block storage volume because there’s no longer enough space for Discourse to compress its backups. (I’ve done a docker image prune etc which is giving us a bit of time, but we’ll need to upgrade the server soon.)
Do the /var/discourse and /var/lib/docker folders need to be on the same volume, or could one stay on the original server’s disk and the other move to the new block storage volume? I suspect that Linode block storage volumes are stored very close to the shared CPU drives (possibly sometimes even on the same physical drive).
Does anyone have any experience with adding a block storage volume on Linode, and whether it would hurt performance to put these folders on different volumes?
/var/discourse is just the docker manager, no? That can be anywhere, I typically just leave it in /root because it doesn’t matter and doesn’t really store data, even if “best practice” is /var/discourse.
For /var/docker, I haven’t personally had experience doing so, but there should not really be any impact so long as you properly mount it. I’m not sure how things work on the cloud side but typically this is a very easy 5 minute task to mount a disk to a specific partition.
My /var/discourse/shared/standalone folder is 19.3GB (in postgres_data, uploads, and backups subfolders), and my /var/lib/docker/overlay2 folder is 12.6GB.
So the /var/discourse folder has my actual forum data. And the /var/lib/docker folder would have the docker images (and the actual Discourse software?)
That’s right. Discourse doesn’t know or care where Docker keeps stuff.
You don’t need to keep Discourse in /var/discourse unless you’re hit by a bus and someone else ever needs to help and they’ll spend a long while finding where you put it.
You can put either on whatever volume you like (again, neither Docker nor Discourse really know what volume they are on)
I know Linux is great at letting you mount anything anywhere, my question was more about the performance of doing so. So you don’t think I’d notice a performance hit?
I guess if Discourse can run well when the DB is entirely separate then this is probably fine.