Originally posted by: Dain
BTW, saving PM's forever may eventually be a thing of the past. We have a few million PMs and there's a very good chance we'll be creating export files of older messages to free up the database.
Yeah, I figured it was only a matter of time. No other site does this and PMs grow exponentially as the user base increases.
As a workaround, maybe you could only save sent messages or only save received messages to save 50% of the file size. Every message has a sender and recipient, so saving every message for every user is redundant. That saves exactly two copies of every message...
Just an optimization idea, but I do agree that saving messages forever is probably not a good long term solution.