Average Database Size?

[Rob B]

OK, I have a poll going on my ProBoards forum now and a move to vB currently leads by 4 votes to 2.

Anyway, I was wondering what the average database size is. I am not keen on the idea of pruning old posts and removing the boards history, but could move old threads out of the search engine...

Say my vB forum got as big as it is now on ProBoards:

134,556 posts
342 members
35 boards

What size database would that be do you reckon?

[Zachery]

Really depends on alot of varibles, however my own site is about at 35MB and is at 100,000+ posts, 500~ users. Of course I store attachments in the file system which takes up anotehr 21MB.

[Bob Isaac]

My vB board has around 34 forums, 9400 members, 105,000 posts, uses filesystem for attachments, and the db is about 121Mb. And growing healthily each day.

Bob

[Rob B]

Ah right, more economical that I thought then.

A 300MB database should basically then allow me a wealth of breathing space, then.

[Vtec44]

MIne is about 100MB for 1500 users, 140k posts. I have auto-prune plugin so it deletes posts that are over 6 months old in the for sale forum.

[Rob B]

What would you do if your database got too big? Can you spread?

[feldon23]

Except for 1&1 webhosting, most major web hosts don't count the database size separately from the account size. If you have 5GB of webspace, you can use a 5GB database. If I ran out of space, I'd get a bigger account.

[Rob B]

Well I know FastHosts state that their databases are 150 or 300MB - I assume that those who don't state a size don't count the database size seperately.

I am looking at A Small Orange at the moment, I like the look of their service. The prices, reputation for service and running of vB is very good and they have a thriving community forum which I always prefer there to be.

[feldon23]

If you store attachments outside of the database, and use Fulltext searching, then 300mb will last you a long long time. By any measure, that should handle 5+ years of posts.

With fulltext searching off, vBulletin stores a copy of every word used on your forum and which post/thread it was found in. This search index can be up to 40% of your database size. Turning on fulltext searching transfers all that heavy lifting to MySQL itself (at the expense of search accuracy).

[Zachery]

If you store attachments outside of the database, and use Fulltext searching, then 300mb will last you a long long time. By any measure, that should handle 5+ years of posts.

With fulltext searching off, vBulletin stores a copy of every word used on your forum and which post/thread it was found in. This search index can be up to 40% of your database size. Turning on fulltext searching transfers all that heavy lifting to MySQL itself (at the expense of search accuracy).

Feldon, fulltext indecies take up as much space as the normal vBulletin search index.

[feldon23]

They take up your database storage? I thought a major benefit of fulltext was not having a huge "word" table.

[Zachery]

You lose a huge word table, for a huge index.

[Bob Isaac]

I have auto-prune plugin so it deletes posts that are over 6 months old in the for sale forum.

Is this from vbulletin.org? I would find this useful.

Bob

[Vtec44]

Is this from vbulletin.org? I would find this useful.

Bob

Yep, it's from vbulletin.org and yep it's very helpful

[Bob Isaac]

Found it

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=99881 by Andreas.

Bob