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Just out of personal curiosity, how much disk space on the server does Stack Overflow take up? I'm guessing it's a lot, but I can't know for sure.

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Couldn't possibly be more than around 640KB. –  user27414 Nov 12 '10 at 17:05
No no no, that's the RAM needed to run it. –  Marko Carter Nov 12 '10 at 17:34
I don't see this listed, but you might find more information in the sources it cites. In particular, you might note that SO is several servers. :) –  Gnome Nov 12 '10 at 18:18
Well, each vote takes up a little more space in the database, so let's just keep upvoting this post until it runs out of disk space –  Michael Mrozek Nov 12 '10 at 19:52
The size of the datadump may serve as an approximation. –  Alexandre Jasmin Nov 13 '10 at 12:34

2 Answers 2

up vote 5 down vote accepted


It is not a particularly huge database, most of the storage we have is taken up by history and indexes. Fitting most of our data in RAM is one of the reasons our performance is so awesome (that and Jeff's amazing wheel of blame).

When you look at perfmon: SQL server page life expectancy is massive, we barely go to disk.

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Kudos to you Sam Saffron, creator of Discourse :) I see size is looked upon heavily and that's a good thing! –  user965091 Aug 22 at 14:18

This is an ever increasing number, so no answer would be correct for long. However, you can use the Data Explorer to estimate the number. The following was accurate in the second half of August 2014.

The Data Explorer does not include the 15% of posts that are deleted (which stays in the real database) or all of the post history, so the actual database size is much higher. Thanks to to Weapon of Choice for this information.

  • This query can be used to find the size of the database tables alone (without indexes), which currently is 140 GB.

  • sp_spaceused on SEDE can be to find the database size including indexes, which currently is 186,567 MB / 1024 =182 GB.

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SEDE does not contain deleted posts and much of voting and review histories. Around 15% of posts are deleted, but they remain in the database. –  Behaviour Aug 22 at 15:08
@900sit-upsaday Thank you, that is a good point. I updated my answer to include it. –  Banana Aug 22 at 15:39

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