deleting approx. 180m records a month

[Nolan Rumble]

Hi,

I have an issue where I need to delete approximately 180 million records a month. I have a script which parses a log file, and imports the data into MySQL. My intention is to keep 3 months worth of log files in the database (approx. 600million records).

Is better to delete the records on a daily basis (in other words, the day which is 3 months behind from now) and run the optimize table query each day or is it better to delete the the records on a monthly basis (in other words, once i've finished importing month 4, delete month 1) and run the optimize query once a month? What would be the optimal way to go about doing this?

Thanks
Nolan