Store mongodb data in compressed format

Question

I am using mongodb to store raw HTML data of web pages using scrapy framework. In one day of web scraping 25GB disk space is filled up. Is there a way to store raw data in compressed format.

Answer 1

There's nothing built in for compression. Some operating systems offer disk/file compression, but if you want more control, I'd suggest you compress it using a library for whatever programming language you're using and manually control the compression.

For example, NodeJs offers simple convenience methods for this: http://nodejs.org/api/zlib.html#zlib_examples

3.0 Update

If you choose to switch to the new storage engine WiredTiger which ships with 3.0, you can choose between several types of compression as documented here. Of course, you'll want to test this change in production workloads to find if the additional CPU utilization is worth the compression received.

Answer 2

Starting with 2.8 version of Mongo, you can use compression. You will have 3 levels of compression with WiredTiger engine, mmap (which is default in 2.6 does not provide compression):

• None
• snappy (by default)
• zlib

Here is an example of how much space will you be able to save for 16 GB of data:

data is taken from this article.