How much server space to allocate?

Question

What would be the minimum amount of space should you allocate to a confluence installtion? I know it depends on the amount of attachments, but if a site has a large number of spaces and a fair amount of attachments in various sizes, how much space would you suggest to use?

Sherif Mansour · Answer

Jonathan,

Although it is possible to do what Richard or Jim have suggested, I stongly suggest you don't store your attachments in the database. Someone from our support time can probably jump in here, but long story short - there are lots of performance implications with regards to backing up your database. Given, you don't really have an option if you are using Clustered (attachments have to be stored in the database right now).

Sherif

Jim Birch · Answer

I would second the idea of storing attachements in the database.  This gives you a single point of backup for the real Confluence data.

We have a database of 5.7 Gb of which 4.6 is in the attachmentdata table and .3 Gb is free space.  There are about 12000 current pages and comments or 84k including old versions.   About 16k attachments, inc versions.  Wiki markup is a fairly compact form of text storage so it's really the number and size of the attachments that will drive your data size.  This relates to the style and purpose of your Confluence instance so there's no clear a priori way of guessing this.

You may be able exert some control on attachment volume by limiting the maximum attachment size.  (You might also get told to increase it :)  The biggest attachments will soak up a lot of attachment space.  We allow up to 10 Mb, but occasionally we need to temporarily break the rule for someone.

Our Confluence home directory is around 1 Gb and the application directory is 0.5 Gb.

Richard Yale · Answer

The best option is to have your attachments stored in the database. That way you need a larger database space than physical space on your server. This will allow your server to run faster.

Then what you can do is have a dynamically scaling database which will increase in size as it is needed. Problem solved :)