During the next weeks we will officially introduce a new database system for log entries, ToDos, and Toplists. The old system (based on SQLite) was sufficient for small to medium installations, but for installations with thousands of sensors it could cause performance bottlenecks. In the past weeks we have implemented a complete rewrite of this storage system. The new engine is up to 300 times faster when writing data and up to 100 times faster when reading data. Furthermore, the writing speed is not affected by the size of the database at all; you can now store a whole year of log data without affecting the performance—regardless of the size of your installation! This is a major breakthrough! You will be amazed at how fast log data is displayed in the web interface when browsing through the logs of the system (main menu item “Logs”) or when viewing logs of a single monitoring object.
The new engine is already built into version 8.1.2 of PRTG which we released today, but it has not been implemented as the default log storage engine yet. We are looking for PRTG users to help us do some “in-the-wild” testing of the new engine. It is performing well in our labs, regardless of installation size, operating system, or system performance. For all test installations in our labs we have seen major performance improvements with the new engine.

How to Enable the New Storage Engine

IMPORTANT: The new storage engine should still be considered Beta. Even though we have seen no problems in internal test - you might lose data of your logs, ToDos, or Toplists. So please do not enable the new engine if it is imperative for your business not to lose any of this data! However, your monitoring data (used for graphs and reports) is not affected by this new feature.

Step 1

Backup your PRTG installation.

Step 2

Make sure that you run PRTG 8.1.2.x (or later). Download the latest version from www.paessler.com/prtg/download

Step 3

Stop the PRTG core server service using the PRTG Server Administrator.

Step 4

In the Windows registry, please go to the following path. Note: Backup your system before modifying the registry! 
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Paessler\PRTG Network Monitor\V8\Server\Core\
Notes: The Wow6432Node\ node is only present in 64bit systems. In 32bit systems, you will not see it, so head straight from SOFTWARE to Paessler. If your current PRTG v8 was previously upgraded from PRTG v7, you will see V7 instead of V8 in both path above. Set the following DWORD values to 1:
  • todoraw
  • lograw
  • toplistraw

Step 5

Restart the PRTG core server service.

Step 6

During startup the old databases will be automatically converted to the new format. This can take a few minutes, for large installations with many toplists even half an hour. Depending on the size of the toplists, some user also reported a time span of several hours for the import. However, this is only needed at first startup. According to measurements in our labs, the import process takes about 1 minute per 10-50 MB of file size of Log Database.db and about 1 minute per 50 MB of total file size in the Toplist Database folder.

Please Send Us Your Feedback

We would like to hear from you about this new feature (and about PRTG in general). Please send your comments to support@paessler.com. Thanks!


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