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

[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?