That does seem rather large. Can you look at the database and see which tables are taking up the majority of the size? That will help me narrow down potential causes.
David.
Thanks for the reply. I may have answered my own question. My 2.5GB figure above came directly from the hosts. This was their reply when I asked why attempts to export the DB always ended in timeouts. They replied that the DB was 2.5GB which was why it kept timing out.
However I’ve just been into phpmyadmin and looked at the actual tables, and they are tlaking a load of cobblers. The DB size in phpmyadmin is ‘only’ about 800MB. That seems much more reaosnable to me … approx 80KB per 500 word post which sounds in the right ballpark.
Ok, I took a backup of my database on Monday with over 1000 posts and that was only 35MB, and that includes a lot of cruft which I’ve since removed. So, even your 800MB seems horribly excessive.
David.
Have you tried “optimising” your database tables in phpMyAdmin? That can make a big difference. There are plugins that can automate this so it happens weekly.
Dartiss asked which tables take up the most space. It’s a good question. Usually it’s the wp-posts table. But I’ve known a few WordPress plugins to create huge numbers of entries and bulk out different tables.
Knowing which table(s) are biggest might point to the problem.
Hi folks,
Thanks for the replies. I’ve found the culprit, it was Next Gen Gallery. The wp-options table was around 350MB (wp-posts was 150MB). wp-options contained 70,000+ rows of NGG messages saying “displayed_gallery_rendering”
Other notable tables included wp-usermeta at 75MB (I recently deleted 40k+ registrations), wp-popularpostssummary at 43MB, and wp-postmeta at 35MB.
The problem with the giant NGG table is essentially what is described in this (two-year-old!) thread: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wp_options-to-many-records?replies=39
The installed version of Next Gen Gallery is the current version 2.1.31.
YMMV!
I am facing a problem. I want to backup my WordPress blog database, when I click on “My SQL Databases” it shows the database size 61.29 MB and when I go to “PHPMyAdmin” to export the database tables, there it shows the size 19.1 MB, what is the problem? Why both are not showing the same size?
