Help Needed Clearing Storage Space on vB-Specific Site

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  • Boss-Hog
    Senior Member
    • Jul 2002
    • 232
    • 4.2.5

    Help Needed Clearing Storage Space on vB-Specific Site

    Hello,

    We recently had to move to a server that had more RAM, and in doing so, we lost half of our storage space. Currently, we sit at 40 GB, and almost immediately, I started getting emails that we are running low on storage space. My site consists only of vBulletin (version 4.2.5) and cPanel, so aside from a 3.5 GB cPanel backup, there's literally nothing else on the site that could be deleted to clear up space. We have many, many old posts, attachments, etc. that could easily be deleted, but prior to this, I really never had an incentive to do so since we weren't at our space limit.

    Anyway, prior to doing anything, we had 4.6 GB free on the new server. I decided to delete a year's (2006) worth of posts (about 2,000 posts) to see if that made any difference, and it did not, as after deleting those posts, we still have 4.6 GB free. I'm concerned that we're going to run out of space on the new server soon, and I'm not sure what I can safely delete that will clear up enough space to make me feel better about that. Can someone please point me in the right direction? Thanks in advance for the help.
  • Wayne Luke
    vBulletin Technical Support Lead
    • Aug 2000
    • 73976

    #2
    Posts really don't take up much space. They are just text which doesn't require a lot of storage. The text from the books of a small city library can fit in the field used to store a single post. That is hundreds if not thousands of books. The English text of Wikipedia is only about 50 GB of storage, uncompressed. That is about 5.7 million articles.

    Space would be taken up by image and multimedia attachments if you allow them. You should be able to manage these in the AdminCP under Attachments -> Attachment Statistics. Though if you deleted the posts that contain them then they would be deleted as well. If your attachments are stored in the database, you will want to move them to the file system. You can do this under Attachments -> Attachment Storage Type.

    Finally, when you delete content from the database it isn't actually deleted. It is just marked for deletion. When you delete a lot of content, you should run "Optimize" on your tables. Under Maintenance -> Repair / Optimize Tables. However, if you're using newer versions of MySQL and INNODB, this may not have any visible effect due to the way tables are stored on the server.
    Translations provided by Google.

    Wayne Luke
    The Rabid Badger - a vBulletin Cloud demonstration site.
    vBulletin 5 API

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    • Boss-Hog
      Senior Member
      • Jul 2002
      • 232
      • 4.2.5

      #3
      Thank you - that was my suspicion about deleting text, so I appreciate the confirmation, and I'm glad I didn't get rid of any other posts. I had checked the attachments stats in the AdminCP before posting here, and I'm "only" using just under half a GB on those, so that's not going to make a tremendous difference. Looking at the entire size of my vB database via phpMyAdmin, it's only 5.3 GB (the searchcore_text table being the largest at 2.2 GB followed by the post table at 1.7 GB), so that's a lot of unaccounted for space on my server that I have no idea what it's being taken up by. I'll follow up with my host to see if I they can point me in the right direction. Thanks again.

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