have been warning people about this for some time, since I started trying to run RPC servers, in fact. As you can see in the two screen shots below, neither of the two biggest steem block explorers have a functioning RPC to use. I have seldom seen steemd.com not say it was having maintenance.

I would like to make some bets, using other than steem, let's say dash, with people, that within 3 months nobody will have a running steemd RPC node, not even steemit.com.

As configured in jesta's guide to setting up an RPC node, you end up with over 50Gb of shared memory file (database storage). It now takes over 24 hours to replay one, even if you have got the 'inside tricks' which I'm sure there is.

Because, remember, Code is Documentation, and the tricks are in there, n00b. Just read the spaghetti.

Graphene is not built to cope with this amount of data. Even bitshares blockchain isn't nearly as big yet as Steem, with only 1 year of data in it. It's probably getting pretty close though.