On 9 Nov 2006, at 09:49, Steve Karlsen wrote:
> I've inherited some Exim servers v4.30 and I have been looking through
> the system and have noted that the hints database is approaching 1Gb
> which sounds excessive! Does anyone know the ramifications of this and
> what can be done to shrink it?
These are db (or dbm) files - they are sparse files
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file) so are not as large as you
think (unless someone has caused them to become non-sparse). Their real
size can be determined using "ls -s" or du
Hints are just that - hints - they are not system critical.
The fastest and most effective way to reduce their apparent size is to
delete them. This will have a short term performance impact, in that
some hosts will be retried that would have otherwise have been skipped
until later. However if your files are stuffed with old data you may get
a significant speed up by dumping that :-)
Using exim_tidydb as described in the manual will reduce the data within
the files, but may not reduce the actual or apparent size of the files
(I am unsure of this, but unless exim_tidydb removes and rewrites the
file it is very very unlikely to reduce the disk usage).
Nigel.
--
[ Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham@??? ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]
