<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="MS Exchange Server version 6.5.7655.1">
<TITLE>Blobs and packing</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<!-- Converted from text/rtf format -->
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">I'm the lead developer for a very large Plone/Zope service being used by the Ontario government. We provide our Collaboration Tool Service to all of the 9 clusters and have grown to ~250 sites with ~10000 users. We're currently using Plone 3.2.3 with Zope 2.10 and RelStorage 1.4.0 (love it!) with Oracle 10g. Our only database option was Oracle on Windows, but we're trying to get permission to switch. Our application and web layer servers are running RedHat.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">We plan to introduce plone.app.blob very shortly. However, we charge a small fee to the clusters which we divide amongst them based on how much space they're using and I'm having trouble understanding exactly how the blobstorage disk usage is affected by packing. I added a few File objects to a site and saw the blobstorage disk usage grow (using the du shell command), but after deleting the objects and packing the database, the size didn't decrease. I thought that maybe the space was freed up to Zope</FONT> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Tahoma">—</FONT><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial"> while still appearing used to the OS</FONT> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Tahoma">—</FONT><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial"> but the space continued to increase (according to du) when I added another file.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">I've already recommended rethinking the pricing model, but we still have to figure out how to shrink the blobstorage. I feel like I'm missing something fundamental, but maybe I'm just doing something stupid. Surely, there must be an easy answer!</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Thanks in advance,</FONT>
</P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">//Scott</FONT>
</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>