[Xapian-discuss] making my db leaner and meaner

[Olly Betts]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 09:47:52AM +0000, Ben Campbell wrote:
> My db is 15GB (although I just ran xapian-compact to reduce that to 
> 12GB). The machine has 8GB of ram.

It's not generally a problem for the database to be larger than memory
unless it's insanely so, or you need to cope with a high query load.

For example, the gmane database is 129GB (compacted, no positional
information) and that machine has 3GB of RAM.  

That's getting a bit extreme (and we're working on replacing the server
with something bigger), but I did some simulations ages ago (with a much
older version of Xapian), which showed that just having 10% or less of
the database cached was still really effective.

Cheers,
    Olly