Andrew Linden spoke to one of the people in engineering, I suppose the engineers in this case are the hardware and operations people that deal with running Second Life®. It was one of these engineers that got Andrew (more of a software engineer) the current size of the Asset Database.
Image by puuikibeach - Flickr
A couple of days ago Andrew guessed the database was about 4 terabytes. He did know a garbage collection run recently completed and reduced the database by 85%. But, Andrew’s guess was off a bit…
The engineer told Andrew the Asset DB is now 192 terabytes…
Working backward and knowing the current size that is 15% of the previous pre-garbage collection size we can deduce the Asset DB had grown to 1,280 terabytes or 1.3 petabytes or 1,280,000,000,000,000 bytes. That was a huge database and the post-garbage collection size isn’t exactly small.