Sitecore Database and App_Data Size

Question

We have 5 relatively small sites running on top of Sitecore. The oldest has been hosted within the environment for 3 years. Currently both the master and web databases are roughly 8 GB a piece - surprising in size but also that they are nearly identical in size (I would expect the web database to be much smaller). Also surprising is the App_Data is over 50 GB in size (MediaCache is 15 GB and MediaFiles is 37 GB). Any ideas or suggestions on ways to reduce files on disc - even temporarily?

Answer 1

Media Files - media items stored on disk (keep this folder)
Media Cache - is where sitecore caches image versions (e.g rezised images)

You can delete all the contents of the Media Cache folder. Sitecore will be gradually recreate the image cache of images that are being used on the sites.

If you use item versioning then you can run use the Version Manager and archive old versions. However as you Master and Web database are almost the same size I don't think that will help you. The web database only holds 1 version of each item.

The last thing would be to crawl through the media library and find items that don't have any referrers in the LinkDatabase and delete them. Make sure you back everything up first.

http://trac.sitecore.net/VersionManager

Answer 2

You can try to shrink databases as well

DBCC UPDATEUSAGE (web)

DBCC SHRINKDATABASE(web, 0);

Answer 3

If you are storing media assets in the Database, I assume you are based on the sizes, I believe you can delete the App_Data folder and it will re-add files there as needed. If you're storing media assets on the file system, they're stored in App_Data which would explain the large size. Is it possible you're storing some assets in the DB and others on the file system? In any case, you should analyze what types of files are in the App_Data and compare it to an out-of-the-box Sitecore instance to see what is site content vs. generated cache files.