I have a MyISAM table with some 300 million records and three indexes. I've been adding data to it in a nightly process. I disable indexes, load data, and enable indexes. (based on advice from here:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/insert-speed.html )
The data file for this table is about 11GB. After many days of this process the index file reached a size of 112GB and we started running out of disk space. I dropped all the tables and rebuilt everything. After the rebuild the index file was only 19GB.
The growth pattern of the index file, and the size after rebuild, seems to indicate some sort of leak, or failure to clean up space.
Is this a known issue? Is there any workaround for this? Should I report it as a bug?
If I drop/add the indexes instead of disable/enable, would that eliminate the issue? How does the performance of drop/add compare to disable/enable?
(for details on my db see my other post:
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?24,105440,105440#msg-105440 )
Thanks,
James Holt