Learn the basics of how to maintain an efficient Magento 1 database of any size.
Magento does many things well, but maintaining an efficient database is not one of them. Having many products is a good reason to have a large database. Sadly, this is not the only way your database can become large and sluggish.
Maintaining the database through log cleaning can result in a dramatic improvement in site performance and latency.This guide explains how to optimize a large and potentially inefficient Magento database.
ATTENTION: Always backup your data before performing any operations on the database.
Read Magento Maintenance: Five Tasks That Will Keep Your Store Running Smoothly.
Magento maintains several tables for logging. These tables log things such as customer accesses and frequently-compared products. Magento has a mechanism for cleaning these logs regularly, but this feature is disabled by default and most customers do not enable it.
It is not unusual to see 2GB+ databases decrease their size by 75% after cleaning the logs. It is therefore critical to regularly perform this sort of maintenance, particularly if your time-to-first-byte latency begins increasing and you have already implemented the other performance tweaks.
You can can clean these logs by using one of the three following methods:
The following tables are managed by Magento's log cleaning function:
log_customer log_visitor log_visitor_info log_url log_url_info log_quote report_viewed_product_index report_compared_product_index report_event catalog_compare_item
Click Save Config.
You can either configure the shell utility log.php as a cron job or run it manually.
php -f shell/log.php clean
This is the most efficient way to clean the logs for those more comfortable working with databases. It is faster than the built-in Magento tools and it allows you to clean other tables not included in those tools. This procedure will consolidate the data inside those tables, often decreasing database size by as much as 95% and greatly reducing query times.
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