Size of contentwords table

Question

1. What is a reasonable size for qa_contentwords?
2. Is there a way to limit the size somehow?

I am aware there is no answer like XYZ MiB, but for example my current question2answer site has 10,452 estimated entries (phpmyadmin) in contentwords with a size of 4,3MiB or 4,5MB and qa_posts has 592 KiB, qa_words 448KiB. Is this a reasonable size or is something maybe flooding my table with spam? Are these still reasonable ratios?

 

I ask because the site is under constant spam, flooding and botnet attacks with thousands calls a day since it got listed in some spam provider after the flyspray bug report tool had a security leak and after that the mediawiki I hosted there. Once you are listed, you get a lot of scans and attacks :D

 

Best Wishes
Nox

Answer 1

Many people ask these kind of questions. I really don't understand why people worry about database size. That table indexes words in post content for fast searching. The longer the posts, the bigger the table. The more unique words each post has, the bigger the table.

So it is reasonable and, if you want to limit the table then just stop posting or always post using the same words of all previous post. This would obviously be ridiculous. The not so ridiculous approach would be to reindex content from time to time in the admin/stats section. Maybe each 10k posts would make sense under normal usage. This process would slightly speed searches... but again... there is no real issue there.

Comments

Because my webhost locked my SQL Insert rights because of the database size exceeding its limit (according to a email from the support) :D That is why I worry about it at all. Thank you very much for your clear answer!

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If you can't insert you can't even post... so ANY table won't grow for sure :)

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Haha you misunderstood me. The database over time grew beyound the providers limit, THEN he stripped the insert rights and THEN i asked the question. I just needed to check question2answer did not get abused for spam.