Title: DB size
Last modified: August 31, 2016

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# DB size

 *  [thoughton](https://wordpress.org/support/users/thoughton/)
 * (@thoughton)
 * [9 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/db-size/)
 * Hi there,
 * I administer a large six year old blog with around 9500 blog posts, and the same
   number of comments. Each post is perhaps 500 words. Full backup is around 15GB
   which obviously is a bit of a pain to deal with.
 * Out of the 15GB, the database size is around 2.5GB. This is around 250KB per 
   post, not including images. 250KB per post seems quite a lot to me for mere text,
   is this normal?
 * Thanks.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

 *  [David Artiss](https://wordpress.org/support/users/dartiss/)
 * (@dartiss)
 * [9 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/db-size/#post-7361868)
 * 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.
 *  Thread Starter [thoughton](https://wordpress.org/support/users/thoughton/)
 * (@thoughton)
 * [9 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/db-size/#post-7362046)
 * 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.
 *  [David Artiss](https://wordpress.org/support/users/dartiss/)
 * (@dartiss)
 * [9 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/db-size/#post-7362047)
 * 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.
 *  [Jason King](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jasoncharlesstuartking/)
 * (@jasoncharlesstuartking)
 * [9 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/db-size/#post-7362067)
 * 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.
 *  Thread Starter [thoughton](https://wordpress.org/support/users/thoughton/)
 * (@thoughton)
 * [9 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/db-size/#post-7362070)
 * 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](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!
 *  [andrewp14](https://wordpress.org/support/users/andrewp14/)
 * (@andrewp14)
 * [9 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/db-size/#post-8545335)
 * 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?

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

The topic ‘DB size’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [database](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/database/)

 * In: [Everything else WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/miscellaneous/)
 * 6 replies
 * 4 participants
 * Last reply from: [andrewp14](https://wordpress.org/support/users/andrewp14/)
 * Last activity: [9 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/db-size/#post-8545335)
 * Status: not resolved

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