Hi Sanley,
basically the answer is yes, 10 million wp_postmeta can be considerable factor in terms of speed. Especially if you are using a lot of custom fields.
However, reducing this number may and may not help. As I mentioned above, it depends on many factors – number of custom fields, types of relationship between these rows, number of “leftovers” etc.
You can try to delete “orphan” wp_postmeta records or optimise the database with some plugin.
Before you do anything, don’t forget to backup your database of course 😉
Assuming that the site architecture is very basic (standard wordpress style architecture) where there is only a parent to child relationship.
Would reducing the size of wp_postmeta help?
I tried some of those optimize plugins but it crashed the database and messed up the site. I’m not sure if its caused by the size of the database or not. Your thoughts?
I am curious as to how many users are sharing these 10 million wp_postmeta entries?
I have written extremely complex membership type sites making extensive use of wp_postmeta for customization of the USER. I honestly can say I have never had 10 million records in the wp_postmeta table and imagine that would cause you significant issues, especially running it on a VPS system with 2GB of RAM.
I wish you luck with your project.
Hey Bob, this isn’t a membership site. We’re using the custom fields to organize our data for a search and filter plugin. However due to the size of site, the plugin can’t handle it.
So basically the custom fields are left unused and I was wondering if 10 million rows of unused postmeta rows can slow down a website or not.
Or maybe our host just plain suck? I have no idea.
I am not sure exactly what type of hosting package you have, but it can have an impact on your server speed. I am not sure why you have so many wp_postmeta entries (I read your original post quickly and thought you had originally said wp_usermeta) but they can get rather large if you are working with custom post types.
The more data you have, the slower your website queries will run and the slower your website will be. I honestly would think that with 10 million postmeta entries, you would be running into issues. How many pieces of postmeta data are stored with each custom post type? Have you considered upgrading your hosting to a dedicated environment? These are the types of questions I would be asking myself at this point.
That would be a pretty cool to have 10 million wp_usermeta. That would mean I have 1 million members on the site. Each member with 10 custom fields each 🙂
On a more serious note, I have already deleted those unused wp_postmeta and posts and the website is much better now.
Previously, I had 1 custom post type with around 300,000 posts each and 10 custom fields each. Those posts weren’t providing much value and not making any money so I deleted them to make way for more valuable posts.
