MongoDB - file size is huge and growing

Question

I have an application that use mongo for storing short living data. All data older than 45 minutes is removed by script something like:

oldSearches = [list o         


        

Answer 1

Virtual memory size and resident size will appear to be very large for the mongod process. This is benign: virtual memory space will be just larger than the size of the datafiles open and mapped; resident size will vary depending on the amount of memory not used by other processes on the machine.

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Caching

When you remove an object from MongoDB collection, the space it occupied is not automatically garbage collected and new records are only appended to the end of data files, making them grow bigger and bigger. This explains it all:

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Excessive+Disk+Space

For starters, simply use:

db.repairDatabase()