Our Domino Administrator noticed today that the as_XXXXX.nsf database was extremely large. This is the database used to store documents and emails if autosave is turned on. Autosave was a new option with R7, if my memory is correct, and although I’ve never used it for a Form in a database (most forms tend to be quite small), I’ve found it invaluable on a number of occasions for emails and Symphony documents.
Being curious I also had a look at my own as_pwithers.nsf database. It was nearly 400Mb. When I opened the database there were no documents in any of the views, which is what I had expected. That’s because I had not written any long emails today, and I didn’t expect autosaved documents from a few days ago. But when I inspected the database I found a large number of deletion stubs. You can probably guess the reason, but if not the Help files explain: the purge interval for deletion stubs is 1/3 the number of days specified in the Remove documents not modified in the last x days setting on the Space Savers tab of the Replication Settings. Sure enough, that was set to the default of 90 days, so deletion stubs were only being removed after 30 days. Once I reduced the setting to 3 days, so deletion stubs are removed after a day and compacted the database, it reduced to 512Kb.
This is unlikely to be a critical issue, but it’s probably worthwhile reducing the setting for the autosave database whenever you’re running maintenance or setting up a user. And if the users are on R8, you can also enable the Compress document data and Compress database design (the latter is less effective) properties on the Advanced tab of the Database Properties.
After all, if a crash happens with unsaved documents, a user will usually recover the document as soon as they next open the Notes Client, not a number of days after the deletion stub is created.
Thanks for the post. More important than discovering that my autosave file was up to 80 mB, I discovered that my autosave file had last been modified October of last year! (It must have been flipped off during an upgrade at some point, and I had never noticed.)
Are you sure about the deletion stubs being the cause of your problems? Assuming a deletion stub is 16KB (which is extremely unlikely – they’re probably less than 256 bytes), you would have to have created and deleted 25000 documents in the last month (over 800 docs per day) to generate 400 MB worth of deletion stubs 🙂
You can use NotesPeek to find out how many deletion stubs you have in your autosave db.