WAMP: Free up disk space and disable binary Logging in MySQL

August 30, 2014   /   by Marco  / Categories :  Technology, Websites
windirstat windows

Our Windows VPS server was running out of disk space (had only 1GB out of 40GB) and I decided to run a scan to check which files and directories was using the most amount of space. You can use an open source tool called WinDirStat Portable to run the scan. After you run the scan, the tool will provide you with a snapshot of which folder is using the most amount of data.

windirstat

What I found most surprising was that the Windows directory had about 21.3GB of data (it was using a whopping 66.4%). If I drilled further into the Windows folder I discovered that WinSxS and sources were the biggest folders.

windirstat windowsS

I decided to put a support call to find out whether these folder were required and the response was:

Please note that the folder ‘WinSxS’ is required for proper functioning of the system. The ‘WinSxS’ folder helps to let multiple applications run in Windows without any compatibility problem. Its not recommended at all to remove this folder, however you can clean up this folder to save some disk-space. Please refer the following URL for more information regarding this.

~~~
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn251565.aspx
~~~

When considering the ‘sources’ folder, although removing it will not affect the system, it is required during processes like repairing the Windows installation.

After receiving the response I decided to just leave it alone and concentrate to see what other folders was consuming large amounts of space. That’s where I found that the WAMP MySQL logging folder (C:\wamp\bin\mysql\mysql5.5.24\data) had over 10GB of log information with files such as mysql-bin.000001

I decided to do a bit of research find out what these files were for. Apparently they are used for MySQL data recover, the events in the binary log and also used for replication. I didn’t use any replication on this VPS server so I decided to stop this logging and delete the log files.

FREE UP DISK SPACE

The steps were:

In WAMP manager open the my.ini file (you can manually find the file here C:\wamp\bin\mysql\mysql5.5.24\data) and comment the following line:

log-bin=mysql-bin

So it should look like

#log-bin=mysql-bin

Restart the WAMP service

Then delete files that look similar to:

mysql-bin.000001

After deleting these files I managed to recover 10GB of free space. There were also other log files that I decided to delete from WAMP and they were the Apache log and error log files located here C:\wamp\bin\apache\apachex.x.xx\logs (replace x with your version of apache)

Stop the WAMP service and then delete them.

In total I managed to recover 13GB of data and for some reason the server ran much faster.

 

 

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