I wanted to post this question in a neutral community and not the specific Lemmy or Piefed ones.

I am curious to learn how resource utilization is comparing in the real world operation of Piefed vs. Lemmy instances, given a similar level of users and user activity? Considering that Piefed is written in Python and Lemmy is written in Rust, I would think that the difference would be significant, but I recall someone mentioning in the past that the main resource constraint for both these platforms would be database-related instead so the language choice wouldn’t have much impact. I’m curious if this is proving correct in the real world as opposed to in theory.

I know that there are a few admins out there who are running both and I would love to hear their thoughts on this.

  • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    I can’t find/remember the post but recently an admin shared some resource usage graphs. The thing that jumped out at me was their Lemmy instance was using 32 GB of ram while their PieFed instance was using 2 GB of ram. Maybe a little more, but it was low single digits.

    Maybe their piefed graph did not include postgresql, which should be 2 GB just by itself… That would bring the total up to around 4 or 5 GB. piefed.social uses between 4 and 5 GB, too.

    CPU usage was quite similar between the two.

    • Cricket [he/him]@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Thanks. Wouldn’t that depend a lot on user demand at the time this was measured? If the Lemmy instance was handling 20x as many users at that time it might explain much larger RAM usage, for example.

      This is why I was hoping to be able to compare for similar levels of users. If Lemmy requires 32 GB for 200 users and Piefed requires 2 GB for 10 users, it could still be that Lemmy was more efficient.

      • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        Yes, it’s tricky. I don’t remember which instance it was but it was one of the smaller lemmy instances with roughly the same MAU as Piefed.social, tho. Not any of the top 6 Lemmy instances.

        It could have been an outlier. Looks like lemmy.mods4ever.com is much more reasonable although that’s a single-user instance so it’s going to be the absolute minimum.

    • Ademir@lemmy.eco.br
      1·
      2 days ago

      That’s not even near reasonable, maybe lemmy.world lol

      Here since 2023 with lemmy.eco.br and never had anything near that.

      Of course there used to be problems on older versions (both Lemmy and Postgres had more bugs back then)

      • Die4Ever@retrolemmy.comEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        It might not be a linear relationship, but could be a decent approximation if we had multiple data points