DEV Community

Kudakwashe Paradzayi
Kudakwashe Paradzayi

Posted on • Updated on

How large is the dev.to production database πŸ€”

This month of October as we do the hacktoberfest I personally adopted the dev.to project.

Browsing though the codebase, I'm loving the way the code looks so organised and simple and the people and bots πŸ˜… who were involved in the code certainly make it seam easy, which is very encouraging.

Now I have this burning curiosity nagging me in the back of my mind

How large is the dev.to production database? 100GB? 500GB? 2TB 😲?

Let's try guessing the size and let @ben and the @devteam tell us the answer in the end.

My guess is ≃ 250GB


Cheers πŸ₯‚
@kudapara

Top comments (22)

Collapse
 
cjbrooks12 profile image
Casey Brooks

I believe all uploaded images/videos are stored on a CDN, so I will not include them in my estimate. But let's get a few other numbers to try and get a better estimate.

  • This article has an ID of 186129, so I'll round to 200k articles for easy math.
  • The text in an article doesn't take up much space at all. I would guess most articles are a few KB in size, and the largest ones less than 100KB. Let's go with a median estimate of 50KB per article.
  • The most popular articles have a couple hundred comments, but most are probably around 10 or so. - Comments are much smaller than articles, so lets go with an estimate of 1KB per comment.
  • The homepage for logged-out visitors has "239,226 humans who code". So let's around to 250k registered accounts. I couldn't even begin to put an accurate estimate on the size of each account record, so lets just say 10kb to account for a bio, linked URLs, etc.

So let's do the math!

(200,000 articles * 50kb) + ((200,000 articles * 10 comments) * 1kb) + (250,000 users * 10kb) = 14.5 GB

I'm gonna put my official guess at 25 GB. Text-based media takes up much less space than you might expect!

Collapse
 
pavelloz profile image
PaweΕ‚ Kowalski • Edited

Yeah, i would guess something around that too.

In math i would also include that this is an rails app, so basically it means it has a lot of trash in db and if using gems like papertrail, its even worse - thats why i would land at around 25GB, because i would say it should not exceed 10GB.

Collapse
 
swarupkm profile image
Swarup Kumar Mahapatra

Wondering if these guys use event sourcing?? If it is , then the event store would be HUGE!. The table size would increased rapidly. The events that would be having large payload would be PostUpdated, CommentUpdated.

However i cannot estimate the numbers.

Collapse
 
abhinav1217 profile image
Abhinav Kulshreshtha

That's very sound maths. You sir have my respect. I had a but more conservative estimation based on a blogging company I once contracted for. My estimation was 72GB rounded.

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern • Edited

My guess is ≃ 250GB

This is the closest guess yet (being the first guess), but it is not correct.

Collapse
 
epse profile image
Stef Pletinck

I'd guess more like 100GiB

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Winner

Collapse
 
epse profile image
Stef Pletinck

Hurray, I've won some fame!

Collapse
 
swarupkm profile image
Swarup Kumar Mahapatra • Edited

Wondering if these guys use event sourcing?? If it is , then the event store would be HUGE!. The table size would increased rapidly. The events that would be having large payload would be PostUpdated, CommentUpdated.

However i cannot estimate the numbers.

Collapse
 
kudapara profile image
Kudakwashe Paradzayi

I don't think they use event sourcing from what I saw as I was browsing through the codebase (though I could be wrong)

Collapse
 
brandonskerritt profile image
Autumn

75gb?

Collapse
 
anes_kampos profile image
Angel Campos

261GB

Collapse
 
tusharborole profile image
Tushar Borole

if you don't include an image, I guess 50GB

Collapse
 
desolosubhumus profile image
Desolo Sub Humus 🌎🌍

One million GB, but only because it's fun to say. I'm 100% sure it's not nearly that big.

Collapse
 
kudapara profile image
Kudakwashe Paradzayi

πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚ That's huuuuge

Collapse
 
desolosubhumus profile image
Desolo Sub Humus 🌎🌍

Ridiculously huge, yup.

Collapse
 
dandoestech profile image
Dan D • Edited

~275GB

Collapse
 
thesubgenius profile image
TheSubGenius

One billion million

Collapse
 
kudapara profile image
Kudakwashe Paradzayi

😲😲

Collapse
 
kudapara profile image
Kudakwashe Paradzayi

Thank you all πŸ‘πŸΎπŸ–€πŸ‘πŸΎ

Collapse
 
edgaarcruz profile image
Edgar Cruz

Maybe 225GB?