[drupal-devel] prune tables

[Nicholas Ivy]

In a previous incarnation of my Drupal web site, I needed access logs 
for certain range of time in order to generate graphs and charts.  So 
my argument is there should be an option to use a time-based limit.

In what other situations are the log tables used?

Nic

On May 10, 2005, at 5:06 PM, Dries Buytaert wrote:

>
> 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/
>