Why is the Plone data.fs file so large, will it effect performance?
on our current site the file is over 8GB. I recently took over dev of this project on a legacy Plone 3 installation and there are huge performance bottle necks on the database.
My first impression is 8GB is huge...?
- There are no large files stored.
- Performance is likely the database as:
- There is a zeo cluster,
- Load balanced with apache
- 8 core vCPU server with 16GB ram
- Any cached page (apache layer) is lightning, others are incredibly slow
UPDATE
After the suggestions below and further investigation. Here are some stats from the server:
Memory Usage 15792/16045 <<--- ouch?
AVG CPU 300-400%, 8 CPUs, 5 x zope instances. Im assuming this is very high? as each instance uses a single CPU thread to handle a request? thats almost an average of 100% cpu usage accross the instances?
Disk IO is high at avg 8984.85 blocks/sec
So what does that point to? The apache log files are huge at 7GB... i will install logrotate. But surely those stats: High disk IO... point to DB issues? Will packing alleviate this? Is packing dangerous on such a high volume production site?
It is highly unlikely that the ZODB itself or the size of your database is responsible for the bad performance. I would recommend to pack your database as a first step. If you haven't done that on a regular basis before, packing will drastically decrease the size of the ZODB:
https://plone.org/documentation/faq/how-do-i-pack-the-zodb