KnowledgeTree Blog

Monitoring Disk Usage

I’ve just been working on two little prototype admin plugins for KnowledgeTree Administrators.
The first one is something to monitor disk space, and the other is to assist in cleaning up temporary files.

Running out of disk space can cause many serious headaches. Although system administrators should be doing regular maintenance and monitoring system resource utilisation - sometimes obvious things are simply overlooked.

These two plugins should be in the next release.

KnowledgeTree is quite hungry of disk space. For each document that you may have in the KnowledgeTree repository, a copy of each change is also preserved. If you are working with 50 megabyte files, make 5 changes, that implies KnowledgeTree needs to 250 megabytes of storage for that one document. Then you also need to take into consideration the index data needs to be taken into consideration, being the searchable text, which is generally to be less than the latest file size - which would mean around 300 megabytes is required.

This implementation may sound slightly crazy from a resource utilisation perspective - but it is the safest mechanism to ensure the document state can be restored.

Hopefully these utilities will save someone’s life one day.