CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We're hosting a Joomla 2.5/CiviCRM site on Bluehost under their basic plan. We use CiviCRM to manage memberships and contributions for at most a few hundred constituents.

We're developing a new Joomla 3.x site on the same account, and Bluehost has deactivated us twice because we have too many database tables. PHPMyAdmin reports ~380 per site, but Bluehost has this to say:

The problem is that your database is storing files, and to do so is in essence storing three table references for each. Example:

-rw-rw----    1 mysql mysql   43 Jun 15 14:32 civicrm_acl_after_delete.TRN
-rw-rw----    1 mysql mysql   43 Jun 15 14:32 civicrm_acl_after_insert.TRN
-rw-rw----    1 mysql mysql   43 Jun 15 14:32 civicrm_acl_after_update.TRN
-rw-rw----    1 mysql mysql 8.6K Apr 20 06:54 civicrm_acl_cache.frm
-rw-rw----    1 mysql mysql 128K Jun 15 14:33 civicrm_acl_cache.ibd
-rw-rw----    1 mysql mysql 8.7K Apr 20 06:54 civicrm_acl_contact_cache.frm
-rw-rw----    1 mysql mysql 128K Jun 15 14:33 civicrm_acl_contact_cache.ibd
-rw-rw----    1 mysql mysql   55 Jun 15 14:32 civicrm_acl_entity_role_after_delete.TRN
-rw-rw----    1 mysql mysql   55 Jun 15 14:32 civicrm_acl_entity_role_after_insert.TRN
-rw-rw----    1 mysql mysql   55 Jun 15 14:32 civicrm_acl_entity_role_after_update.TRN
...

Your databases only report ~250 tables via PHPMyAdmin because PHPMyAdmin does not count the .frm .ibd, or .TRG as tables. However they do store data as tables, so the database can reference, search and use them. Our admins programed our file and database count utilities to count the actual number of tables, which does include the .frm, .ibd, and .TRG tables which in turn is how the discrepancy arises between our count vs what you see in PHPMyAdmin.

Your usage...
    Mount: /home1
    Size: 1853.87 MB
    File Count: 59,652
    MySQL DBs: 2
    Total MySQL DB Size: 173.76 MB
    Total Mysql # of tables: 1,517

My questions are these:

1. Is this normal CiviCRM behavior, or do we have something misconfigured?
2. Is it possible to move those files out of the database without creating performance or maintenance issues?
3. Could we reduce table count in other ways?

I'd prefer to not have to move our development site to another server. Thanks in advance.

I suspect no-one has answered because the answers are:

1. Yes, it is normal CiviCRM behavior
2. No
3. No

you get what you pay for...
CiviCRM is more resource intensive than a basic website, even one running a CMS.
in my experience, very few cheap shared hosting solutions are adequate for running CiviCRM effectively.

CiviHosting starts at $15 per month - & BlueHost at $5 per month. How much of your time has gone into this problem so far & what is your time worth?