Hi John,

>I've looked at our servers and have over 1.2 terabyte in system object
>data, and 11,700,000 files.  This from 1400 nodes.  Do you mean to say by
>"delete them" you actually go out and del fi * "SYSTEM OBJECT"?

Yup, delete them, they'll back up again. We had over 15TB in
these files and I'm down to 11TB now. If you delete them now
(presumably without error), you'll save yourself a lot of
CLEANUP BACKUPGROUPS processing later. Either way, it has to
happen. Oh, and you might have to defrag your database...

I've done this on a small server (4.5% utilized on 166 GB
allocated) and it took all day to get to v5.1.1.6. I probably
would have fared better if I had deleted all of the SYSTEM
OBJECT files, but I only nuked the ones above 1 GB. I didn't
defrag this one because the level of fragmentation was only
about one percent. Again, I'm writing the whole thing up for
the list...

It's a risk, because our bare metal restore procedures depend
on a current SYSTEM OBJECT backup, but I can't let the database
swell to infinite proportions - the performance is horrible.

Luckily, the problem is fixed in v5.1.1.6.

Gretchen Thiele
Princeton University