Why is the Plone data.fs file so large, will it effect performance?

Question

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:
  1. There is a zeo cluster,
  2. Load balanced with apache
  3. 8 core vCPU server with 16GB ram
  4. 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?

Answer 1

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