New site; database growing very fast

[Secret Squirrel]

Ok, up front, I'm going to admit to being a Xenforo newbie. I did some stuff with vBulletin like 20 years ago, and I haven't touched any forums since. But a "co-conspirator" and I got a wild hair and decided to start a forum. We're running 2.2.

Here's our problem: We went live this week. In three days, with only about 10 users, 800 or so posts, and about 75 attachments, we have nearly exceeded our MySQL database size limit. The report from our hosting provider says we are at 233 MB on our database. Our service plan limits the database to 250 MB. It looks like we are going to hit our limit in a day or two. We could buy a more expensive plan, but even the most expensive plan the host offers (which is way out of our budget) only offers a max database size of 4 GB. So it looks like even if we bought this plan, we could only run the site for a couple of months before we ran out of space.

Why is the database growing so rapidly? Is this the way Xenforo works, and should we have been prepared for it? What do large sites with many users and lots of activity do for database hosting? Sorry for the newbie questions, but I did some searches first and couldn't find anything that looked like it directly pertains to our situation.

 

[Paul B]

Our service plan limits the database to 250 MB.

What?!

Find a new host - that's ridiculous.

Basic shared hosting costing a few tens of $ a month doesn't even have limits like that.

 

[Secret Squirrel]

Basic shared hosting costing a few tens of $ a month doesn't even have limits like that.

Thanks for the reply. Its shows how far out of the loop I am. I do avionics; I don't do Web sites.

 

[Paul B]

Based on the stat's on your site, the cheapest shared hosting would be more than enough.

There are a few providers here who offer hosting.
I'm not familiar with all of them but I did host with @MattW for a while for less than $15 a month.

mattwservices.co.uk - Server Configuration / Hosting / Support

I've not really put anything on here to advertise myself before, as people have just been contacting me to request work be done. Here is what I'm available to do. Server Management Services Server Configuration (CentOS / Cpanel) Apache setup Nginxcp setup Switch MySQL to Percona / MariaDB...

xenforo.com

 

[Mr Lucky]

. The report from our hosting provider says we are at 233 MB on our database

That is absurd

I have 8000 users, half a million posts and database is less than 200MB .

 

[Paul B]

I have 8000 users, half a million posts and database is less than 200MB .

You use enhanced search, don't you?

So the search index is not stored in the database.

Regardless of anything else, a host which limits databases to 250MB is one to stay far away from.

 

[Sim]

That is absurd

I have 8000 users, half a million posts and database is less than 200MB .

I don't think you're measuring that correctly. Either that or your posts are all very short?

I have a site with 1.3 million posts and no search index (using ES) that is using 1.6GB of data, so I'd expect something more like 500MB for a site with only half a million posts?



My post table alone is using 1.1GB of data.

Note that this site is archived and we cleaned out a lot of user data, so real database usage from a similar sized live site would be higher.

 

[Secret Squirrel]

You use enhanced search, don't you?

Yes. We installed it with the initial install.

I don't think you're measuring that correctly. Either that or your posts are all very short?

Most of our posts are short, but we don't have anywhere close to a million posts. More like 1000.

The usage number I have is from a system email that was sent to my partner. It's in Dutch, so I can't read it myself, but it says that we're up to 233 MB of database usage.

 

[Mr Lucky]

don't think you're measuring that correctly. Either that or your posts are all very short?

so I'd expect something more like 500MB for a site with only half a million posts?

Sorry I was basing it on the downloaded database which was compressed to 180MB. The actual size is 650MB

However I have a much smaller forum and that is 160 members 3887 posts and the uncompressed database is only 37MB

So 233MB with 10 users and 800 posts seem way to high.

 

[Davyc]

Not sure where you're located, but Ionos do great hosting for very little money and they offer 2GB databases either MySQL or MariaDB (your choice). Here's a selection of packages from the UK site - they do have facilities in many countries including the USA if that's where you are based.

Web Hosting for the UK starting at £1/month ᐅ IONOS

UK web hosting packages for £1/year ✔ Includes domain ✔ Reliable – 99.9% uptime ✔ Storage and databases ✔ 24/7 support ✔ Free SSL » Get your project up and running now!

www.ionos.co.uk

I've been with them for over 20 years and very few problems, minor niggles at most.