I had fun the other day. I happened to notice a few FT Indexes on databases that had swelled to 1.5-2Gigs per database. The databases themselves were only about 80-200M, yet they all had attachments. These attachments were in certain fields in certain documents, and upon asking, the database users never needed to search on them, only on the actual database fields.

I asked the Windows server admin to print out a list of the entire "Data" directory, so I could see the entire list of directories that ended in '.ft', and how big they all were. It turns out the old Domino administrator had just turned on all the settings when creating FT indexes for the databases that needed them.

This is a common and easy mistake to make, but a costly one. And it's sneaky! It's hard to imagine at the time what a huge impact ONE little checkbox setting can make.

One day later, I had all the databases that did not require indexed attachments under control, and back down to a respectable size.

Another easy mistake to make also cost us quite a bit of disk space. The administrator had also later disabled the Domain Indexer task on the server document as it was unnecessary and unused. However, you also have to go in and delete "ftdomain.di" from the Data directory. There was 14G of unused index sitting there for years, getting backed up every night.

When all was said and done, after one day, we had reclaimed 40-50G on the servers. It was like CHRISTMAS, I swear. It's the little things in life that make you happy. Keeping servers lean, mean, and orderly is one of them.


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