Inactive accounts purge

[charmian]

By now, I'm sure that everyone has heard about how LJ is purging inactive accounts.

See here for a more detailed explanation of what's going on there:
http://soph.livejournal.com/206549.html

Anyway, as currently stated, the purge most likely will not affect most users negatively. It seems the only users positively affected by the change are those seeking to rename to a desired-but-in-use username, although it seems that many of those people aren't satisfied anyway because the username they wanted isn't going to be up for deletion.

I wonder what technical or other benefits the deletion/purgation of inactive user accounts has? Does it somehow reduce the strain on the site?

Comments

[synecdochic]

It really doesn't help (disk is cheap), and indeed can hurt -- database fragmentation means that lookups become more inefficient. IMO the only reason to do this is to free up usernames, thus fueling the purchase of rename tokens.

[damned_colonial]

If they're deleting comments by the inactive users as well as entries, it might clean up spam I guess? But I would have thought it was a drop in the ocean.

[sophie]

They're not deleting comments made anywhere other than the journal that's being purged; that's only happening for suspended users, as far as I know.

[azurelunatic]

Since spammers get suspended, that would in fact clean up spam.

[foxfirefey]

I've seen some code in changelog to address consolidating users on clusters, I think, so I think they're addressing that problem.

[charmian]

Thanks for the information! I wonder how many useful ones really will be released, though... Hopefully some people will find the ones they've been searching for.

[trixieleitz]

It's been requested fairly frequently by the userbase, but I'm not starry-eyed enough to believe that the LJsuits use that criterion as any kind of basis for decision-making ;)

It's been an article of faith for me that it's not the data, it's the bandwidth and database calls that affect site performance; an account that no-one views costs nothing. An account that isn't being updated but that other people still look at costs bandwidth, sure, but it could also generate ad views and new users.

But you know all this anyway :)

[sub_divided]

R says that when you purge the database, you improve performance because the speed of retrieval improves. "It's not about space, it's about speed: space is not that cheap when you look at it from a bandwidth perspective." She also says that the enterprise-level database licenses and system and database admins that come with new servers are not that cheap.

[foxfirefey]

enterprise-level database licenses

Not to disagree entirely, since it's quite possible LiveJournal has a service contract with the company that owns MySQL, but they don't necessarily have any of these licensing expenses; and it's also possible that even if they did have a service contract with MySQL, that it wouldn't be server-based.

That being said, database admins aren't cheap, this is true. However, LiveJournal's drastically cut down on US operations staff in the past couple of years.

[charmian]

What made them able to do that? Does the operations staff not need to be local and they have Russian op staff too? Or did the amount of servers and traffic decrease that much?