Posted by SCdF on
URL: https://discuss.orbeon.com/Is-it-possible-or-even-a-good-idea-to-remove-eXist-from-Orbeon-tp1472382.html

Hi,

We use an Orbeon 3.7.1 nightly build from 2009/6/1, and I have been looking into some high heap usage. I have discovered that:
 - Despite using the default eXist configuration (where it states it uses a max of 48Mb+24Mb of heap) the org.exist.storage.BrokerPool is at 220Mb and still growing.
 - eXist is also using a massive 5Gb of HDD space, which is also continuing to grow. I assume that this is because state that is stored there is never cleared. It was mentioned in another post that the way to solve this was to stop Orbeon, delete the files and start it again. This is not an acceptable solution for us; we need to be able to to solve this while Orbeon is running.

So:
 - I understand you use eXist for storing session state, such as instance data, but is it necessary? Can Orbeon be run without eXist, simply storing this information in memory (we don't care about the redundancy eXist provides)? Is a configuration without eXist tested or supported anymore?
 - This may be a question for the eXist people (I will also ask them, but while I'm here...), but do you have any idea why eXist is using so much heap space?
 - Why does eXist endlessly grow on disk? Is this because the data you store is constantly growing without being culled, or is it some eXist malfunction?
 - If it because the data is constantly growing, is there sufficient data in the schema that we could do something like purge all stored instance data more than n weeks old (probably using the exist scheduler functionality).
 - Have any of these problems been fixed in builds later than the one we have?

Thanks,
 - Stefan du Fresne