Freeing up drive space on WAMP MYSQL server

I almost got caught today running out of drive space on one of my moodle servers.  I happened to log into the server and look at the drive space, I like to do this periodically/proactively.  Today, when I looked, I saw 1.7 GB out of 40 GB left free.  Yeowsee!

I jumped into "where is the space being gobbled up mode".  I found myself looking in the

wamp\bin\mysql\mysql5.5.24\data folder.  It contained 17 GB of space.

I remembered from a previous post I did that MySQL writes its transactions to a binary file when the system reaches a certain limit or is restarted or is issued a flush command.

I noticed looking at the binary files, that there had been a few restarts done to the server over the past couple weeks.  Must be automatic Windows restarts.

I modified the my.ini file in the wamp\bin\mysql\mysql5.5.24\data folder, commenting out the line responsible for writing the *flushed content to a binary file.

See this post for a bit more detail. - How I saved 20 GB on my server.

Moral of the story?

Check drive space periodically.  There is nothing worse than to be caught and have to react when a server crashed and people are contacting you and your blood pressure is up in your nose!  It is much better to be proactive and see these things coming and to catch them and kill them before they get you!