Is my loading time normal?

[Farnaby]

This is my reasoning behind my realm.

I want a realm with the details of the Pathfinder Golarion campaign setting as well as the crunch. This I can take and export portions of it into my campaign realm as needed. E.g. Rise of the Runelords doesn't need anything apart from 2-3 lands. I don't need the rest.

So I started from scratch again and wiped every realm locally to have a clean slate, I uninstalled RW and deleted all the data apart from the structure and export files.

I created a brand new test realm, imported the structure and then imported the spells and feats. The following are the changes in the MASTER.REALM size after each step:

Start 5,040 KB
Global Data Sync 6,812 KB
Creating new realm 7,235 KB (pathfinder, structure file with 3 new categories)
Adding 9,828 KB export file with 2,777 feats 1,407,660 KB
Adding 16,166 KB file with 2,829 spells 3,986,780 KB

I have used and installed Lotus Notes back in the day and have a background in intercontinental networking as well as IT security. I mention this to prove that I know a bit about IT as a whole.

My question is how (insert random profanity here ) does the database expand from 7.2 MB to 1.4 GB and then 3.98 GB after importing 9 MB and then 16 MB text? No graphics, just a csv file created by using the csv2rw app.

And now here comes the really interesting part.
Seriously I did not expect this and I suggest everybody now should do it on a regular basis.

I went into tools under database management in the starting window and chose Compress Database. Even though I hadn't deleted anything, imported multiple times or do anything to cause bloat it reduced the MASTER.REALM down to 168.68 MB, which is still a about 130 MB more than expected, but a lot less then multiple GBs.

Despite my surprise, I have no problem with this, if RW works like this then okay. But I personally think this should be put in a prominent place so that everyone is aware of this and should do the compression on a regular basis.

And from a pure professional aspect, it would be interesting to know where the 130+ MB size comes from. The answer is going to be rational but I can't put my finger on it and that's annoying.

P.S. Thanks for all the replies, it's interesting to find out what more experienced users have realised.