Compressed storage

[buurd]

Hi!

I question that surfaced during a contact with our IT-department. We are going to have about 1 miljon documents in our Alfresco installation. It is mostly going to be documents that simply are waiting for archiving, but still need to be accessable. The question is if it is possible to apply compression-algoritms to the document storage?

The way our setup look it would be preferable if the compression happed in the webapplication both from the storage point of view, but also to limit the impact of bandwith between the servers. I'd also belive that it would be easier to add webservers to get processingpower than  a database or  a fileserver?

Just a thought

Best regards
Roland

[invictus9]

Alfresco documents are stored as a conventional file in a file system, and a set of metadata held in a database management system.

Have you looked at storing your files on a file system that does the compression on the fly? Typically, documents need to be uncompressed during the first few hours of storage, while the indexing methods work through the file. Once the full-text-search indexes are compiled, the document will not likely be read again for quite awhile, so they can safely be compressed.