[ZODB-Dev] RelStorage Blobs and packing

[Jim Fulton]

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 12:34 PM, McCuaig, Scott (MGS)
<Scott.McCuaig at ontario.ca> wrote:
> 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!

To be clear, this is a question about how RelStorage handles blobs.

Jim

-- 
Jim Fulton