Optimize Magento Database is one of a very important task of developer who maintain magento site. Let ‘s play around with the number relate to database size and performance because we need to know why we do cleaning magento database to get the best performance before we do it.

For example you are running a magento site have:

– 200 visitors/day.

– 500 page views/day.

– 200 accounts.

– 30 orders/month.

The question is how much can you save monthly in magento size when you optimize magento database by database cleaning? The answer is ~200MB. It ‘s quite big number for me, and how cool is it if we can save it monthly what will release the database engine a lot for every query to database.

Another question is why magento save a lot of database what we don’t need? The answer is because of the tracking. The ecommerce system need to have a very good tracking module what can show everything for user if something wrong happen with their order. And many other reasons why magento have to log a lot. But our topic is not for log, let ‘s talk about that later, now we try to do optimize magento database by clean all of log database to release resource and size of database.

As always, let ‘s do the back up before doing anything relate to database. Here is step by step to clean database log.

Optimize magento database Log Cleaning

Magento maintains several tables for logging. These tables log things such as customer accesses and which products have been compared. Magento has a mechanism for cleaning these logs regularly, but unfortunately this feature is disabled by default and most customers do not turn it on. There are three ways to clean out these tables: via Log Cleaning in the Magento Admin, via log.php in the ../shell directory, and manually via phpMyAdmin or mysql client.

The following tables are managed by Magento’s Log Cleaning function:

log_customer
log_visitor
log_visitor_info
log_url
log_url_info
log_quote
report_viewed_product_index
report_compared_product_index
report_event
catalog_compare_item

Let ‘s execute this SQL to clear and optimize them

SET foreign_key_checks = 0;
TRUNCATE dataflow_batch_export;
TRUNCATE dataflow_batch_import;
TRUNCATE log_customer;
TRUNCATE log_quote;
TRUNCATE log_summary;
TRUNCATE log_summary_type;
TRUNCATE log_url;
TRUNCATE log_url_info;
TRUNCATE log_visitor;
TRUNCATE log_visitor_info;
TRUNCATE log_visitor_online;
TRUNCATE report_viewed_product_index;
TRUNCATE report_compared_product_index;
TRUNCATE report_event;
TRUNCATE index_event;
TRUNCATE catalog_compare_item;
SET foreign_key_checks = 1;

Optimize magento database Log Cleaning via Admin

1. In the Magento Admin, go to System > Configuration.
2. In the left menu under Advanced click on System.
3. Under “Log Cleaning”, change “Enable Log Cleaning” to YES and configure the Save Log for 15 days:
4. Click “Save Config”.

Optimize magento database Log.php

The shell utility log.php can be configured as a cron job or run manually to clean on-the-fly.

From the Magento root directory, type:

php -f shell/log.php clean

The –days switch can be used to specify how many days back to save.

Manual Cleaning via PhpMyAdmin.

This is the most efficient way to clean the logs for those more comfortable working with databases. It is faster than the built-in Magento tools, and it allows you to clean a couple of other tables not included in those tools.

• Open the database in PhpMyAdmin via the Siteworx Control Panel.
• In the right (main) frame, select the check box for the following tables:

dataflow_batch_export
dataflow_batch_import
log_customer
log_quote
log_summary
log_summary_type
log_url
log_url_info
log_visitor
log_visitor_info
log_visitor_online
report_viewed_product_index
report_compared_product_index
report_event

• At the bottom of the page, click the drop-down box that says “With Selected:” and select “Empty”.
• A confirmation screen will appear. Click “Yes”. This will truncate all of the selected tables.

Perform Regularly

It is very important that this sort of maintenance is performed regularly. Particularly if your time-to-first-byte latency starts growing larger, and you’ve implemented the other performance tweaks. I already seen a 4GB+ database drop down 2GB+ after cleaning log. It ‘s very nice to get your magento site faster a lot with this simple tasks.

Anyway, optimize magento database by cleaning log is only one way to optimize magento. You can check Speed up Magento post to see all of ways to improve performance.

Notice: Some statistic information will be lost if you clean these log tables (like visitor info, visit URL info…), if you think they are useless with you then feel free to clear. If you are not sure what you delete you need to do the backup before doing these steps.