In a message dated 6/21/2004 5:02:01 PM Eastern Standard Time, brion@pobox.com writes:

Note that currently we don't have diff-based storage; when you make a
change to a page the entire previous revision is stored in whole.
(Consider enabling $wgCompressOld if you have zlib support in PHP; this
will reduce old text requirements by roughly half.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


Currently, my group's wiki is small. There are a few of us actively contributing right now, but that will probably change soon. The handful of volunteers that have been putting in content have also been learning the way of the wiki as they do so, making multiple edits on some rather lengthy articles, and innocently eating up storage space.

At the moment, our wiki is restricted to only registered users being able to contribute and only the sysop can create a registered user account.

We had attempted to research the wiki's overhead requirements in making a judgment as to whether or not to buy more disk space from our provider. During the investigation of overhead storage requirements, we used the 'wikipedia' statistics and charts on space. It never occurred to us that 'wikipedia' was storing full copies of all versions of an article based on the 590MB May 22, 2004 number and considering the high number of articles the db had. We must have been reading the wrong statistics.

Do the 'wikipedia' administrators remove history from their wiki in order to preserve space? If so, how is this done? Is there some sort of 'export only the lastest version of each article, etc.' option, clear the db, and then import the lastest version back?

Our administrator has set the "$wgCompressRevisions = true;" since your message (above) -- will that take care of only the revisions since the flag was turned on or will there be compression of the previous revisions as well?

I appreciate everyone's patience in this. I'm sort of the go-between right now. Hopefully our administrator will come online with this list and she can pose the questions more 'technically'. :)

Our versions:
MediaWiki: 1.3.0beta2
PHP: 4.3.4 (apache)
MySQL: 4.0.18

Take care,

Debi