[Zope] Urgent - Database has consumed all possible space

[jwsacksteder@ramprecision.com]

Because every change to an object creates a new copy of that object. This is
how the undo feature works. By packing the database you choose to throw away
those old copies. If you had a webcam application that pushed a 10k file
into your Zope database every 60 seconds, your database would grow by 14 Mb
a day even if no other changes happened. If you have 200 Mb of data and 10%
changes every day, that adds up exponentially. 

day 1 	200 mb
day 2 	220 mb
day 3		242 mb
day 4 	266 mb
day 5		293 mb
day 6 	322 mb
day 7 	355 mb

70% overall growth in just 7 days! 

Either pack the database frequently or use temp folders for
frequently-changing objects(and forego undo).

Perhaps you need to pack the database in chunks. If the time the server was
created is x, you could drop transactions  older than x + 1 month, then x +
2 months, etc. It should slowly shrink. This is similar to what happens to a
severely fragmented drive that is completely full- you have to make an
initial pass to free space so the defragmentewr can work better on the next
pass.

If you have another machine available, you could move the data.fs onto it,
pack and move it back. 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Havard [mailto:nhavar@hotmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2003 4:24 PM
To: zope@zope.org
Cc: plattem@inetnebr.com
Subject: Re: [Zope] Urgent - Database has consumed all possible space


If it were only so easy. This is a shared box with many other applications 
and databases on it. Our database was only supposed to take up 200-300mb NOT

1.8gb big difference. The DBA's have scrounged for extra space and given me 
all they could. Hard drive space for these machines is expensive and not 
something I can just ask for. Plus I still need to explain why 200-300mb 
worth of text files exploded in ZOPE to 1.8gb of information.