The discussion revolves around the storage size of Discourse instances, with user ljpp sharing that their 58k-post, 1000+ user community is consuming 46GB of storage, despite backups being only 217MB each. They express concern over unexpected storage growth, suspecting Discourse is not respecting their backup retention settings, leading to excessive local backups. steko questions whether too many backups could be the cause, while codinghorror and riking suggest using ncdu and cleanup commands like /var/discourse/launcher cleanup to investigate. NotGael shares that old Docker images were the culprit in their case, and ljpp continues to troubleshoot the backup deletion issue, noting it could lead to significant storage bloat if unaddressed.
Our community (Tappara.co, 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?
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?
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.
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).
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.
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