I believe it's the logrotate tool (plugin) that creates these, and your cron or the poor man's crontrigger that makes it happen. I think if you disable the logrotate plugin, they will go away, although someone once told me that's not a good idea, for various reasons.  I wonder what would happen to the master log, if it wasn't rotated -- never tried it.

Anyway, we manually delete these on a regular basis. It's my understanding that is what's suppose to be done or it could get crazy. I also suppose one could write a plugin to do it automatically. I'm surprised it's not built in the logrotate plugin, but that's all beyond me.

Ron

Cheers Ron,

Has anyone got any further info on whether the logrotate plugin actually deletes an older set of enteries from the Database, so it only ever stores so many of these log rollovers 'elggsystem_log_1249081201'.

It never deletes any of the log tables.

I highly recommend using the logrotate and garbage collection plugins.  They do some important things to keep Elgg's databases optimized.

It won't hurt you either way to keep or to delete the rotated log tables--that is, the tables with the numbers after them.  logrotate keeps them around because many networks must retain logs for various legal reasons.  The biggest reason to delete them would be if you have a quota for your DB size.

We rotate once a week. 50 tables a year, every year. Right? Although not beyond a quota, wouldn't or would not that be a bit much, just for table sake? We'll continue to clean ours, I'm just wondering for my own knowledge whether there's any problems in having too many tables.

thats good to know i have been swithering and swaying wether or not to delete them for a while, my database has gone over 100mb i really need to keep it as low as possible, am not sure why its got so high.

any way to make the database beyond 25MB ??

I did delete the elggsystem_log_*

but the database file is still the same size and it keep growing 

any idea how to recover the empty space ?

i'm a newbie about Mysql 

@Georges - make sure that garbage collection of sessions is turned on in your php.ini. Also, a limit of 25MB is crazy. Find a different hosting provider.

what about if I empty the table   elggusers_sessions   ??

it's more than 40.000 records in it 

I did empty the table users_sessions and resolved the problem now the database is smaller