Manual talk:Reduce size of the database

(Question also asked here.)

A Wiki that I am using for courses has grown to about 7GB over the years. I have now deleted the files of about 150 older users, 1,500 pages, 15,000 revisions or so. Frustratingly, the database size is the same, actually a bit larger. I ran OPTIMIZE on the text and archive tables, but mysql says: "Table does not support optimize, doing recreate + analyze instead" - and the database size is the same. Any advice will be appreciated.

A related problem is that deleting files has also not worked as expected: the maintenance scripts have created new files in an images/deleted subdirectory, which has now grown to 322MB - and I can't delete those because they are owned by apache. Do I really have to go through the sysadmin for such a routine task as debloating the database?

Any advice will be welcome! Thanks. Boris (talk) 03:49, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

(MediaWiki 1.34.2; PHP 7.3.25 (apache2handler); MySQL 5.5.62-log)

Did you run deleteArchivedRevisions.php --delete ?

MediaWiki is designed to prevent accidental data loss. There's no way to permanently delete a file without involving sysadmins.

Is it a big deal?

Nowadays it is less important. However there are still hosters around which limit the database size to 2 GB or so. To cut it short: If you have never come across the need to reduce the size you are fine without doing it.