[ZODB-Dev] Blobs and packing

[McCuaig, Scott (MGS)]

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.

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 - while still appearing used to the OS - but the space continued to
increase (according to du) when I added another file.

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!

Thanks in advance,

//Scott
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