Size, growth and limits.
TYPICAL SIZES
- A small brochure site: a few megabytes
- A blog with several hundred posts: tens of megabytes
- A busy shop with years of orders: hundreds of megabytes or more
WHAT MAKES DATABASES GROW
Content, which is the legitimate part Post revisions, which multiply every edit Expired transients, which accumulate and are rarely cleared Log tables from plugins Spam comments Order and session data in shops Statistics plugins, which are frequently the largest single contributor
THE COMMON DISCOVERY
A site with two hundred posts and a five hundred megabyte database. Almost none of it is content.
CHECKING WHAT IS LARGE
phpMyAdmin lists tables with their sizes. Sort by size and look at the top few.
Anything named log, stat, transient or session is usually bloat.
WHY IT MATTERS
Backups take longer and cost more storage Queries slow as tables grow Imports and exports become difficult
WHAT TO DO
Covered in the maintenance section. Cleaning bloat frequently reduces a database by most of its size.
