Switching article storage

[sashkr]

I'm thinking about switching article storage. From DB to FS.
And have couple of questions.
1. At OTRS FAQ there is one warning: "Your web server user should be the 'otrs' user.". Why? I've checked file permissions on /opt/otrs/var/article. It's rwxrwsr-x (2775). Owner is 'otrs', group - 'www-data'. So I think there is no issue with that. Why web server should be under 'otrs' user?

2. How many free space should be during switching process? It should be twice large as DB size? Should I manually shrink DB after process?

3. Moving files from DB to FS will take more space on disk? If cluster size = 4 KB and i have a 10 GB of small files with 2 KB in size - it will take 20 GB on FS?

4. I' ve read about one issue on this site: "http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.otrs.user/40595"

Just two things to pay attention to… activating this option will generate tons of small files on the FS. This has cause 2 issues for us:

1. Running out of inodes on the partition (“df -i” to monitor this) - we’re using Linux. I don’t know if there can be a similar problem on Windows

What can you say about that?

5. What else should I know before starting?

[crythias]

1) Because filesystem changes will likely happen as the otrs owner (scheduled processes), while it may not be the same when apache runs (web processes).
2) It's not the DB size, it's as big as the size of the attachments. Though, the size of all the attachments could be the majority of the size of the database.

3) if you're concerned about space in the 10-20GB range, you probably need to re-think why you want to do this. Provision space for growth. Even if you have the "correct" answer from this topic, your questions are concerning for us forum topic answerers. What would be the implications to your production system if we're off any significant-to-you amount?. Of course new attachments will be as-is in the filesystem,

viewtopic.php?t=27849

4) it's likely because of http://windowsexplored.com/2010/12/16/i ... in-emails/ or something similar (That is, you'll see these tiny attachments from Outlook senders, and they'll create files when switching to FS). If you're constantly seeing this in "all" your tickets, you'll see representation in the FS export. Not much to do about this during DB->FS.

5) It's probably going to take a while. Make sure you have good backups.
Search this forum for ArticleStorageFS

[sashkr]

1) Honestly, I didn't understand. As I said before /opt/otrs/var/article has 2775 permissions. So 'otrs' and 'www-data' users can read and write to that directory without any problems. So I ask again: why web-server should be under 'otrs' user?

3) My DB is 18 GB in size. It happened in less than 8 monthes. So, next year it will be more than 50 GB in size. Should I switch storage from DB to FS?

[crythias]

Honestly, I didn't understand. As I said before /opt/otrs/var/article has 2775 permissions. So 'otrs' and 'www-data' users can read and write to that directory without any problems. So I ask again: why web-server should be under 'otrs' user?

Just in case what the scheduled processes, which run under user otrs does, doesn't have problems with file access when apache does something, and vice versa. If you aren't worried about what happens underneath that folder (file permissions don't always inherit folder permissions) then don't worry about it. Just look at what a new file's permissions get. If group doesn't get write access, issues.

3) My DB is 18 GB in size. It happened in less than 8 monthes. So, next year it will be more than 50 GB in size. Should I switch storage from DB to FS?

Well, probably yes. But my concern is more about whether you're *worried* about the space if it's "only" 10-20GB or if you're just curious what will happen. (if you're curious, just duplicate your data on another virtual machine and test it out. )