[Mediawiki-l] Conserving Storage Space and Removing History

[AlphabetDP at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/21/2004 5:02:01 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
brion at 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







-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/attachments/20040625/7c839ad8/attachment.htm