[!CAUTION] 🛑 DO NOT USE LTC - There is unresolved security issue, see https://github.com/wereii/lemmy-thumbnail-cleaner/issues/10

Lemmy Thumbnail Cleaner

This is a simple program to remove old thumbnails from pict-rs and lemmy.

It will periodically check the lemmy database for posts that are older than given amount of months and instruct pict-rs to drop the thumbnail for that post.

Usage

This program requires connection to the lemmy postgres database and pict-rs HTTP service. The expected deployment is as container/service alongside the pict-rs and lemmy postgres services.

Edit the lemmy docker-compose.yml to include this service:

services:

  # ....

  cleaner:
    image: ghcr.io/wereii/lemmy-thumbnail-cleaner:v0.1.3
    #restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      - RUST_LOG=info
      - INSTANCE_HOST=https://your_instance_host.here/
      - POSTGRES_DSN=postgresql://user:password@postgres/lemmy
      - PICTRS_HOST=pict-rs:8080
      - PICTRS_API_KEY=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
      #- THUMBNAIL_MIN_AGE_MONTHS=3
      #- CHECK_INTERVAL=300
      #- QUERY_LIMIT=100

⚠️ Only pict-rs 0.5+ can be used, older versions do not implement required API endpoints! ⚠️

Pict-rs also needs to be configured with api key (PICTRS__SERVER__API_KEY), otherwise the endpoint required for this cleaner is not accessible!

Configuration

Required Environment Variables

• INSTANCE_HOST - The "root url" of your lemmy instance. For lemmy.world this would look like https://lemmy.world/.

  This is used to determine if a thumbnail of a post is local to this instance (and thus can be deleted).

• POSTGRES_DSN - The URI to the lemmy postgres database. Must be full postgres DSN and must specify the lemmy database (usually /lemmy).

• PICTRS_API_KEY - The API key for the pict-rs service.

• PICTRS_HOST - The host of the pict-rs service, this is just ip/hostname, optionally port (ex. pict-rs:8080).

Optional Environment Variables

• RUST_LOG - Controls logging level, debug will also print the thumbnail ids being deleted (lots of lines).
  Without this the default level is warn.

• THUMBNAIL_MIN_AGE_MONTHS - The minimum age of a thumbnail in months before it is considered for deletion.
  Default is 3 months.

• CHECK_INTERVAL - The interval in seconds the program sleeps between checks.
  Default is 300. The main use is to give other services breathing room and not keep hitting them constantly with requests.

  • Setting this to 0 will make the program run once and then exit.

• QUERY_LIMIT - The maximum number of posts to get from postgres in one query and thus the maximum number of thumbnails to delete in one check interval.
  Default is 100.

  • Increasing this has direct impact on postgres as it has to return more rows.
  • It will also increase memory usage of the cleaner as it keeps the rows in memory until processed (though this shouldn't have too big of an impact).

• DELETE_ON_NOT_FOUND - If set to true the cleaner will "unlink" the thumbnail from the post even if pict-rs returns 404 (not found) when trying to delete it (basically on 404 it assumes the image does not exist already). Default is false.

  • Warning: This can leave "dead" thumbnails in pict-rs that are not associated with any post!
  • You should only set this if you are sure that the thumbnail can't be anywhere else (e.g. in some other pict-rs instance).

The CHECK_INTERVAL and QUERY_LIMIT is what controls how demanding the cleaner is on the database and pict-rs. You should tweak it to fit the performance of your infrastructure.

When there is a lot (10k+) that can be cleaned up you should reduce the CHECK_INTERVAL (5-15s) and then increase QUERY_LIMIT (~500) to speed up the process. Keep in mind the program is intentionally single-threaded so increasing QUERY_LIMIT too much will keep the program continually hitting both pict-rs and postgres for longer.

Once there is less (hundreds) you can increase the CHECK_INTERVAL to hours or days as there won't be that much new thumbnails old enough (but that depends on your traffic).
I would personally expect this to run once or twice a day at that point, with query limit of around the 300.

Notes

Backblaze B2

When the bucket lifecycle is configured to Keep Only Last Version, the old versions are not deleted immediately but hidden instead and deleted after 24h.
So don't be surprised if the bucket size doesn't change immediately.

Results:

• My instance of 2 MAU, running for about half a year had about 95k files and 12G of data before running the cleaner.
• After running the cleaner, fully removing all older then 1 month (and after waiting for almost 2 days) the b2 bucket usage dropped to 57k files and 7.9G

Disclaimer

My rust is rusty so there might be some issues with the code.
I have tested this on my own instance and it works as expected but

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK