1 reply to this topic

[Jeremy Trask]

Hi Dave

Thanks for your enquiry.

Most of the issues that we come across are related to memory limitations on a site and very large _individual_tables but not the overall database size.

Particular individual table problems relate to tables populated by statistics type plugins or redirection plugins that log details - if unchecked these can generate enormous tables over time (I have seen up to 800MB for a statistics table) which will always be a problem. A good plugin will have a means to limit the table size or aggregate data to reduce size and that can help.

sometimes there are also problems with _posts table where revision control is not in effect and there are many revisions or large posts/pages or even a large number of pages/posts with frequent revisions. Because WP stores a complete page/post for each revision the table size can quickly build up and can cause other site problems as well. When we see this we advise setting a revision limit in wp-config.php and using a plugin that can remove excess revisions (WP itself doesn't do this _unless_ you edit the page/post - ok for a small number but a pain if you have a lot).

The _postmeta can also get a lot of stuff dumped into it by various plugins that may add metadata to posts.

In the latest version of BackupBuddy we do include the capability to exclude tables and that can be useful for tables like statistics tables which really you don't absolutely have to backup or migrate.

Also the latest version allows for the use of the native mysqldump command to create the database dump (provided your host allows the PHP exec() function and mysqldump is provided and runnable through exec()). This avoids some of the memory issues associated with having to do the database dump from within the actual server process using PHP - certainly it is faster and should have fewer memory issues.

Certainly if your individual tables are only of the order of a few 10s of MB then unless your server constraints are very tight it shouldn't be an issue one way or another.

I hope that gives you the information you need but please ask for any additional clarification as may be required, thanks.

Regards...jeremy