I guess the database for javaranch would be huge as we have many many posts across different forums and this multiplied with the number of users at any given point of time.
Jothi, As point out in another thread, JavaRanch uses flat files, not a database.
While I would expect it to be large, keep in mind the data is just text - not attachments. This makes the memory requirements significantly smaller than say an e-mail system.
I'm not sure what multiplying the number of posts with the number of users accomplishes (maybe that was just a figure of speech?), but by now we have something like 370.000 discussion threads (and thus a multiple of that in individual posts).
The raw number of posts is not really a problem, as most of them are old and inactive. On any given day there are usually no more than around 400 active topics. Over time, the posts do take up more storage, but with storage costs being what they are these days, that's not something to worry about. What will degrade over time is searching through the archive of posts. Let's hope that the algorithms used by Lucene get better faster than the search is getting slower through an increasing number of posts...
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