498
18% of people running Nextcloud don't know what database they are using (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
151 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Nextcloud asked in a poll at https://mastodon.social/@nextcloud@mastodon.xyz/115095096413238457 what database its users are running. Interestingly one fifth replied they don't know. Should people know better where their data is stored, or is it a good thing everything is running so smoothly people don't need to know what their software stack is built upon?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

I'm saying this based on real world experience: after a certain point you start to see deminishing returns when optimizing a system, and you're better off focusing your efforts elsewhere. For most applications, customizing containerized services to share databases is far past that point.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    I’m saying this based on real world experience

    And do you think I would spend my time engaging if that wasn't from my own very "real world experience" of lessons learned the hard way?

    Bringing-up "diminishing returns" as if this was an optimisation game also doesn't do this justice. Take the typical "household FOSS package" with software names often brought up in here: a nextcloud instance, a photo-sharing service like immich, private instant messaging, a software forge, a subsonic-compatible audio/video streaming server, a couple php websites like wallabag and RSS aggregators.

    An Intel Atom CPU and 4GB of RAM is plenty sufficient for all that, and will cost you single digit USD a month, granted you put the (one-time) effort to tune and balance those services. Would you run all the above from upstream's docker files, I can guarantee you that you would deem this (perfectly fine otherwise) server underpowered for the task at hand (and would probably go for a 10th gen or so Intel Core CPU, quadruple the RAM and 3-6× the energy cost in the process).

    And that's the point I'm making here: a self-hosting community of tinkerers should (ideally) know better, for the ethics' sake of keeping the process environmentally friendly, and not wasting other people's money.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    You seem to be obsessed with optimising one resource at the expense of others. Time is a limited resource, and even if it only takes 5 minutes to configure all of your containers to share a single db backend (it will take longer than that even if you just have 2), you're only going to save a few MB of RAM. And since RAM costs roughly $2.5/GB (0.25 cents/MB) your time would have to be worth very little for this to be worthwhile.

    On the other hand, if you're doing it to learn more about computers then it might be worthwhile. This is a community of hobbiests, after all...

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    You seem to be obsessed with optimising one resource at the expense of others.

    If you want to push it and paint me as obsessed about something, then let it be this: providing this community with on-topic and reasonable advice

    you’re only going to save a few MB of RAM.

    This is false, and you should read once again my previous message illustrating why: on a decent "self-host"-friendly machine, the same software may work very well, or not at all, depending on whether the user would engage with very basic configuration. This goes beyond RAM (memory isn't the sole shared resource), and I'm adamant that the alternative (which was "pretending that the problem doesn't exist" turned into "throwing money at the problem") is unreasonable.

    On the other hand, if you’re doing it to learn more about computers then it might be worthwhile. This is a community of hobbiests, after all…

    Or more importantly: the extent to which you can self-host out of sheer luck and ignorance like you suggest is very limited. If you don't want to engage with a minimum amount of configuration, you might bump into security issues (a much broader and complex subject) long before any of the above has a material impact.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Besides RAM, what resources do you think you're saving? Not CPU cycles or IO ops, because you're processing the same amount of DB queries either way. Not power consumption, since that isn't affected by RAM utilization. Maybe disc space? But that's even cheaper than RAM.

    Or more importantly: the extent to which you can self-host out of sheer luck and ignorance like you suggest is very limited. If you don't want to engage with a minimum amount of configuration, you might bump into security issues (a much broader and complex subject) long before any of the above has a material impact.

    You're mischaracterizing what I said. My point is that running multiple DB processes on a server isn't going to have a significant impact on system load, if all other factor are kept constant.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent