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How large is the dev.to production database 🤔

Kudakwashe Paradzayi on October 08, 2019

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 cod...

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Casey Brooks • Oct 8 '19

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!

Paweł Kowalski • Oct 8 '19 • 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.

Swarup Kumar Mahapatra • Oct 9 '19

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.

Abhinav Kulshreshtha • Oct 9 '19

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.