Maintenance

System maintenance

Application maintenance

Reindexing to generate landing page thumbnails

nohup rake gwss:reindex_everything RAILS_ENV=production &

This is run as a background job (thanks to nohup) so you can safely exit your session. In a system with 10,000+ items, it can take several hours.

Manually triggering reindexing will hopefully be no longer necessary when we implement sidekiq (#31 - this is working in development for our other Hyrax app)

Application database maintenance

The database includes a searches table (which seems to come with Blacklight) that, in our experience, grows large over time (e.g. 32 GB / 94M rows over 3.5 years). Its contents do not seem to be needed by the application.

To check the size of the database, at the postgres prompt:

select table_name, pg_table_size(quote_ident(table_name)) from information_schema.tables where table_schema = 'public' order by 2;

To delete the rows:

delete from searches;

To reindex:

reindex table searches;

To vacuum (i.e. return un-needed disk space back to the OS):

vacuum;

Do not run vacuum full, especially on a production system that is live. vacuum full requires a lock on the database.