# What is the size of your Discourse instance?
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-the-size-of-your-discourse-instance/49538
**Category:** Self-hosting
**Tags:** hosting
**Created:** [September 1, 2016, 8:16am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-the-size-of-your-discourse-instance/49538 "2016-09-01T08:16:43Z")
**Posts on this page:** 9
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@ljpp](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ljpp)
#### Post date: [September 1, 2016, 8:16am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-the-size-of-your-discourse-instance/49538/1 "2016-09-01T08:16:44Z")
Our community ([Tappara.co](http://tappara.co/about), in Finnish) is less than one year old.
- We have about 58k posts by 1000+ users. Images and backups are pushed to Amazon S3.
- Our backup size today is about 217MB and growing at a rate of 0.5MB - pace will pick up as the season starts in two weeks.
According to OVH’s dashboard, our instance is already using about **46GB** of data, which seems quite a lot. I perform /launcher and apt cleanup jobs regularly.
I am getting slightly worried by the storage footprint of our forum, as we are in this for the long run. What are your numbers in terms of posts, users and storage consumed?
---
### Author:  [@steko](https://meta.discourse.org/u/steko)
#### Post date: [September 1, 2016, 8:34am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-the-size-of-your-discourse-instance/49538/2 "2016-09-01T08:34:59Z")
My forum is much smaller than this, so I’m not sure my experience is relevant here, however: **how many backups do you have stored**? If one backup is 217 MB is it possible that 46 GB result from (too) many old backups?
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### Author:  [@ljpp](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ljpp)
#### Post date: [September 1, 2016, 8:39am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-the-size-of-your-discourse-instance/49538/3 "2016-09-01T08:39:02Z")
I was just looking at my backups during your reply, and noticed that Discourse (1.6 stable) was not respecting my setting for the number of locally stored backups (7). There were about a dozen of unwanted backups locally stored, but that only accounts to 2GB or so.
Ping @sam
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [September 1, 2016, 8:56am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-the-size-of-your-discourse-instance/49538/4 "2016-09-01T08:56:56Z")
No repro – I’ve never seen that, so likely an artifact of setup or migration.
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### Author:  [@ljpp](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ljpp)
#### Post date: [September 1, 2016, 8:58am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-the-size-of-your-discourse-instance/49538/5 "2016-09-01T08:58:59Z")
How much storage does Meta consume?
I have now re-set the value for the number of stored backus. Let’s see if it starts behaving as expected. Rather big bug, since if unnoticed this can cause massive data storage bloat (daily backups).
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### Author:  [@riking](https://meta.discourse.org/u/riking)
#### Post date: [September 1, 2016, 7:24pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-the-size-of-your-discourse-instance/49538/6 "2016-09-01T19:24:16Z")
Try running `ncdu /` on your server and diving down to see which folders are taking up the disk space.
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### Author:  [@ljpp](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ljpp)
#### Post date: [September 18, 2016, 4:24pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-the-size-of-your-discourse-instance/49538/7 "2016-09-18T16:24:42Z")
Strange. On this one instance, Discourse still does not delete the automatically created backups according to my settings (7 to keep). I have been resetting the setting with no effect.
Any ideas how to debug?
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### Author:  [@NotGael](https://meta.discourse.org/u/NotGael)
#### Post date: [December 31, 2021, 1:58pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-the-size-of-your-discourse-instance/49538/8 "2021-12-31T13:58:13Z")
Hello, for anyone checking for that type of problem,
Personally it was caused because of too many old discourse docker images.
I gain more than 10 Go doing a little
```plaintext
docker image prune
```
---
### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [January 13, 2022, 7:55pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-the-size-of-your-discourse-instance/49538/9 "2022-01-13T19:55:18Z")
You should be able to clean using
`/var/discourse/launcher cleanup`
per the official docs as well.