How to Clean the Magento 1.x Logs

Magento log cleaning helps you keep your Magento shop fast by cleaning and optimizing your database(s).

Magento saves your web statistics by logging these in your database. This data is useful, but it takes up a lot of disk space and unfortunately Magento’s database is not very efficient. To keep your Magento shop optimized and thus fast, you’ll need to clean these logs. An easy way of cleaning up your database is by enabling Log Cleaning in the backend of Magento. This method is called ‘Automatic log cleaning’. More advanced Magento users can manually clean their logs.

Enable Automatic Log Cleaning

Magento offers an easy tool to clean your logs. When you’re not familiar with Magento’s database system, we recommend you to use this tool. Simply follow the steps written below:

Log into your Magento backend System -> Configurations
In the left menu under Advanced click on System
Under Log Cleaning, change Enable Log Cleaning to YES and configure the Save Log for 7 days
Click Save Config

The most important setting is Save log for .. days. We recommend you to pick a number between 1 and 30 days.

Manually Clean the Magento Logs

It is not recommended to manually clean your logs if you don’t have prior knowledge of MySQL databases.

Cleaning your Magento logs manually is the most effective way of cleaning your logs. You can use either SSH or phpMyAdmin to manually clean the logs.

Manually Clean the Logs via SSH

Log on to your Hypernode via SSH, navigate to the root of your Magento shop (usually /data/web/public/ and use the following command:

php -f shell/log.php clean

Manually Clean the Logs via phpMyAdmin

Open your database in PHPMyAdmin and select the following tables:

dataflow_batch_export
dataflow_batch_import
log_customer
log_quote
log_summary
log_summary_type
log_url
log_url_info
log_visitor
log_visitor_info
log_visitor_online
report_viewed_product_index
report_compared_product_index
report_event

Scroll down to select ‘Empty’ from the dropdown ‘With selected’ and click yes.

Turn Off Database Logging

If you don’t need any database logging it can be worthwhile to disable all logging. To do so, install the disablelog extension by Yireo. For shops that are heavy on the database, this can help reduce the amount of update/insert queries and therefore reducing load times.