I'm wondering, what resources does Lemmy need? For a small instance (let's say, me and some friends) or a large instance (think Lemmy.ml or Lemmy.world or the like...).
My personal instance is 2 vcpu 1gb ram and 30gb storage. It's just me using it, but it's running rather decently, so maybe if it's just a few people you could get away with something like that
Net IO is inaccurate as that also includes networking between the individual containers (I'm definitely not exposing postgres to the wider world, at least not intentionally)
Oh, and images are using about 200MB disk space so far, although this server hasn't been up for more than 24 hours even, so we'll see how that goes.
Is it shitty setting an instance up or is it doable?
Definitely needs some work. The instructions are all over the place, the Ansible roles expect to be the only thing in your system (unfortunately common), both the manual and Docker installation guides are meh and partially unsupported. Caddy is a config snippet and "good luck" (implied, they don't put it that bluntly). I'm sure there are a fair few people who are accidentally running a dev-focused setup on prod.
TLDR: It's definitely not for the newcomer. I may throw my own configs up somewhere for future reference.
Lemmy runs fine when you start out, with only a few comments and posts in the PostgreSQL database. The real problems come in 0.18 when you start to join communities from other servers and get more and more data in the system. Then your performance needs start to climb rapidly.
I have 1TB SSD storage total on the server. It’s easy to extend the container, if I need more than 32GB. Right now my instance is only using ~2GB of storage.