Thread:Project:Support desk/Unusually Large database: 8GB/reply

For each text change, that is saved, MediaWiki creates exactly one new revision. Each revision points to exactly one record in the text table; most likely this will not be an old record, which just can be re-used, but a record will be newly created when the users saves the page. Each entry in the text table holds the complete text of the according page (and not only parts of it).

So if you have 667.012 edits, then you will have around that number of rows in the text table. The size of each of these rows obviously depends on the length of the text. If the text table is around 5 GB = 5.000.000 KB in size, this means that your average text is around 7,5 KB big. I don't know your texts, but that sounds like a possible length to me.

Do you in fact want to reduce the size of the database? If so, this is most likely possible - with and without removing data from it.