TedPride has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
I know the following node asks pretty much the same question, but there isn't enough information, specifically on the issue of storage space for database vs filesystem, for me to make a decision.
http://www.perlmonks.com/?node_id=433891
Incidently, what if I stored all the post text in a single file outside of the database, using fixed size sectors and just storing the sector start and number of sectors used for each post in the database? Given a reasonably well-designed sector size (factor or multiple of disk sector?) I could reuse sectors from "decayed" posts (new post needs 3 sectors, look for decayed post with 3 sectors) without wasting large amounts of disk space or significantly increasing lookup times. Is this worth the trouble, or does mySQL internally do the same sort of thing for large chunks of text? In other words, if the max size of the text is 64K, and the post is actually only 2K, is the extra 62K wasted? Would it be better to use, say, 8K sectors and only waste 6K?