Documentation toolkit for SharePoint database size

Many users wonder how much database space our SPDockit takes. Willing to maintain our high support, we decided to test the application and find precise numbers.

To conduct our tests we used a SharePoint farm consisting of four web front servers, four application servers and one SQL database cluster. We then filled up our SharePoint farm with 200 GB of content with over 200,000 different files and folders. With this setup in place, we were eager to see how our application would fare.

First set of tests

The first set of tests was run on our SharePoint farm, but with only 15 GB of content and about 10,000 files and folders. The full load time was around 45 minutes. The results can be seen below.

Moving on to the second part

With the first set of tests done, we proceeded to test SPDockit on a SharePoint farm with 50 GB spread over 25,000 files. The full load time on this farm was around 100 minutes, and the database size results are shown in the second figure below.

Once again you can see that SPDockit shows stable and predictable behavior. The size increase is once again linear and the size of the database after one full load is 41 MB. These results are consistent with previous results. The only difference between the tests seems to be the factor by which the database grows. In the first set of tests it was around 20% of the initial database size, but here the database grew 33% of the initial size. To recap after two rounds of tests, we can say that the database will be 1024 times smaller than the total size of the SharePoint farm after the first load and will increase around 25% with each subsequent load.

Final round of tests

And so we come to the third and final round of tests. This time we will test SPDockit on SharePoint with 200 GB of content with over 200,000 files and folders. It takes SPDockit around 240 minutes to do a full load on this configuration. The results of the database size tests are shown in the third graph.

Conclusion

From these tests we can deduce the following about the SPDockit database:

• After the first full load, the SPDockit database will be around 1024 times smaller than the SharePoint farm size.
• The database will grow around 35% of that initial size with each subsequent load.

To conclude, we expect that the SPDockit database will grow as shown in the table below.