Problems with InnoDB size and Windows

[Stefan Ohletz]

Hi there,

to test MySQL's performance on two large tables (having just a few fields), I created two corresponding text files (.csv) with random data and tried to read them in with the LOAD DATA command. The size of the first text file is about 1 GB, the size of the other one about 500 MB. Looking at the physical size of the InnoDB table, I observed that the file size grew to about 1 GB in 1 hour. From then on, speed decreased consideribly. After about 24 hours(!) the table size had grown to only 1,7 GB, when the server process crashed. Now I cannot connect to my database.

Is the physical size of InnoDB tables limited in any way? Does anyone have an idea what could have happened there? How do I have to configure InnoDB to support large databases/tables, which are bigger than the physical limit given by the file/operating system?

Thanks in advance for any help or comments,
Stefan