LQ disk usage
 

Good morning

A question popped up in my head, as I saw the message on LQ homepage:

"There have been 1077 threads and
2905 posts since your last visit."
(2 days since my last visit)

Do all these posts (they appear quite fast and in great numbers) not fill up the hard disks on the computers hosting LQ? I'm sure there are quite a lot generated every month. Or is there some neat trick to php that I am not aware of?

Jeremy or one of the mods could give you sure fire answers, but when you create a post. It is just an ASCII text entry in a database. You'd have to type a boatload of text to make a significant file. Images like smiley's are just an href link to the store location(small amount of ascii text). The thing that would really fill disks is posting pictures that were uploaded to the server if they allow it. Most people post pictures that are actually located on an Online storage site, or there own.

Like I said, I can't say exactly how this site is run, but most would follow that general idea

I think the last time someone asked this the Database for the forum itself was a little over 500megs. I'm sure in total with the HCL and Wiki now its close to 1 GB or more... not totally sure myself though, those are my guestimates.

I've also started an online forums (please click on the link in my signature ;) ) I would like to have a fair estimate of how much disk space I would need for future expansion!

I am not planning to have Avatars or anything like that. Just the database alone.

Thanks.

Stick in an 18GB SCSI drive and you should be fine for quite a while