[drupal-devel] prune tables

[Dries Buytaert]

Would it make sense to change the "Discard watchdog/access log entries 
older than" settings to use the number of SQL table rows, rather than 
the number of days?

The problem?  Again, at drupal.org, I had these set to "3 days" which I 
felt was short enough for the tables not to grow unwieldy.  It wasn't 
until this week that I found out -- through extensive profiling -- that 
3 days was too long.

The point? Unless you are a Drupal developer, you won't profile your 
site.  This means, most users have no clue about how much data is kept 
track of, or why their site becomes slower and slower.

The question? How can we make it so that this doesn't happen?  To me, 
having an option "Number of records to keep" rather than "Discard 
records older than" makes sense, because (i) it gives me control over 
the maximum number of table rows (ii) without having to worry about 
traffic bursts or a growing number of visitors (the cost is more likely 
to be constant over time).  It gives me a clue about the 
performance/resource ramifications of certain features.  Having a 
similar setting for the sessions- and history-table would make sense 
too.

Would this degrade or improve usability?  Suggestions?

--
Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/