Support

January 11, 2023 at 6:12 am

Hi Michael,

I see a forum Q&A from 2019, nearly identical to my situation, which asks about a whole bunch of database tables identified as belonging to “event-espresso-decaf [not installed]” that actually belong to EE4? Is that correct? I did have Decaf installed several years ago, so I thought they might just be lingering.

May I ask, what is listing those tables as being from Decaf?

Decaf is basically a reduced version of Event Espresso core, in fact, decaf is built dynamically from the core product so a lot of the codebase is identical. It doesn’t use separate tables from the ‘regular’, Decaf can create the tables and then you switch to regular and it continues to use those same tables, I assume they are listed as {prefix}_esp_* tables?

In short, under normal circumstances, Decaf will not have left any lingering tables on your site.

Altogether, the EEx tables take up ~20MB of my total of ~80-some MB of databases. I’ve never had to look at this before – is 20-ishMB an unusual number? If I delete old events that are just hanging around – there are several, will that have a significant impact on the databases’size?

Any entity within Event Espresso (Event, Registration, Contact, Message etc) is stored within the database so the more of those entities you have, the more storage you require. We can’t store and display data within Event Espresso without that data being stored somewhere, right?

Individual events themselves don’t take up much data, but all of the other related data around that when combined is a lot more. For example, a single event with 1 DateTime and 1 Ticket is not all that much data at all within the database (the event post would be in wp_posts, DateTime in esp_datetime and ticket within esp_ticket…. although there is other data stored as well it’s still not much). But if that event allows for 5000 registrations the data increases exponentially. Registrations have related entities such line items, payments, transactions, messages and various other data which all have to be stored somewhere so 20MB of data may or may not be a lot depending on your individual setup.

If you delete the events within Event Espresso (they will be trashed and then need to be perm deleted) it will scan for related data when deleting them and then remove all of those entities which will have an impact on the size of the tables.

Ultimately the more registrations you have within the site, the more data needs to be stored so the more storage required.

January 11, 2023 at 3:27 pm

what is listing those tables as being from Decaf? – Hosting company recommended WP-Optimize, which looks pretty popular, and that’s what is identifying the tables as Decaf.. For example (screenshot):

Hmm, I’m not sure where it’s picking up that info from tbh.

Right, no question about that. The question is more about the ‘efficiency’ of the database size ie variable data for events and users, compared to fixed overhead and structure. We have one event a year that goes to about 500 people in a good year, and a few others that run 10-100. I’ve been keeping about 5 years of old events ‘just in case;’ maybe I’ll go back and trim that a little.

The EE database tables are fairly well-optimized as is tbh, eCommerce in general just stores a lot of related date and it does all add up.

As it turns out, however, all that was apparently just interesting stuff. DreamHost is now telling me, after letting WP-Optimize do it’s thing, that my 90MB of databases is “quite small,” although EE is 20+% of that which is why I’m asking, so other than maybe deleting some older events I think this mystery is solved for me.

Yeah 90MB is pretty much nothing in the grand scheme of things, I’m managed sites running WooCommerce with XXGB’s just post meta tables purely from the products, its gotta save somewhere at the end of the day.

I get that your question is based around EE taking up a large portion of your DB size, however, EE stores/uses/needs more data than the majority of plugins out there so it skews the figures a fair amount when comparing to others etc.

A word of caution when using WP-Optimize, it you allow it to randomly prune data you can lose your relationships, especially when using custom tables like EE does. For example, it would go through an delete a bunch of EE event post types from wp_posts, we then no longer have the foreign key from the EE event to join the data together within the queries. I’m not saying it actually will do it, just make sure you have a backup before running it.