My ipbcore_output_cache table keeps growing and growing.  It's currently at 11GB and recently crashed my database when I ran out of disk space.  

I've searched and oddly, "ipbcore_output_cache" produces 0 results in Google.  

I would like to purge that table so I can export the data and do a clean install on a test environment.  

Any ideas?  

you didn't search here 

 

I had the exact same problem. My workaround was to switch everything to redis. You can purge that table without problem.

 

 

@thefarang Install Redis.

Thanks @b416 and @Gabriel Torres, I missed that thread.  

At least in the short term, I purged the data in that table (support told me I could purge the data with no negative consequences).  However, even when totally purged of any data, it was still 11GB on disk so I ran the following command on the MySQL database.  

ALTER TABLE ipbcore_output_cache ENGINE=InnoDB;

That shrank the file size down to a few K so it seems to have cleared things up for now.  

I'm going to have to take a look at Redis.  

MyISAM isn't very optimal these days and can end up with a lot of fragmentation until you optimize the table, especially with tables that have large variable TEXT columns combined with lots of inserts and deletes (which is exactly the case with this table).

I would recommend (1) ensuring you don't store guest cached pages for too insanely long (30 seconds is the default) and (2) monitor now that you've changed your database storage engine to see if the issue occurs again or not.