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Garbage collection

  

The LINCKS database system can grow quite large. The reason for this is that no objects are overwritten, but rather new versions of objects are created with the appropriate changes. However, some of the space used by the database can be reclaimed using cutoff. The steps are:

  1. Stop the database server. See section 4.1 for how to do this.

  2. In the database directory create a directory called Archive (mkdir Archive) and copy all the database files *.dat, *.mol, *.names, and index into Archive.

  3. Run cutoff. It takes only one arguments, the database directory.

    cd ~/mydatabase; cutoff .

    (. is the current directory.)

  4. When cutoff is finished running, restart the database server.

Be warned that cutoff is not exactly speedy, so do not do this at such a time as the database might be needed.



Martin Sjolin
Sat May 27 00:36:55 MET DST 1995