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The size of Groove workspaces

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Lately, I've seen a number of questions about the size of Groove workspaces. I mentioned a couple of size limitations in my recent article on GFS workspaces, as well. This article will discuss what determines the size of a Groove workspace, and best practice for keeping Groove disk usage down.

Factors that affect the size of a Groove workspace

A standard Groove workspace stores all the non-file content of the workspace (Discussion entries, Form records, etc.)  in two locations: the workspace record (an .xss file stored in Groove user data) and pointers to the file content of the workspace (from the Files tool, Pictures tool, and attachments in other tools) in the Groovebinaryfilestore.xss_ folder. All content is encrypted and files are also compressed. From this, you might expect that the size of a Groove workspace (as given in the workspace Properties) would be smaller than the cumulative sizes of the content that you see in the workspace. However, a workspace also includes the following kinds of content:

  • Additions, deletions, and changes that have not yet been received by all members on all computers
  • Undo information for recent actions
  • Content deleted from the workspace but not yet purged from disk, an action which is done in batches

The size of the workspace, as listed by Groove, includes this "invisible" data.

Because of this, a workspace with extensive activity or members who are not frequently online will typically take up significantly more room than its contents, while in a workspace with less activity and more active members, the difference will be less noticeable. This is also why frequent trimming of workspace contents will sometimes make a workspace bigger, rather than smaller.

How to minimize the disk space used by Groove

  • Stay available. Have workspace members online in Groove as frequently as possible, and have workspace members with multiple computers log on to Groove on all their computers on a regular basis. Changes to a workspace are queued by endpoint. That means that if you make a change to a workspace with three other members who all run Groove on two computers, six copies of that change are queued, under most circumstances. (The exception is if several endpoints have the same Groove relay. In that case, Groove may send that relay a single copy with fan-out information.) Workspace managers may want to consider uninviting members who are seldom online in Groove.
  • Avoid unnecessary changes to the workspace. If you are editing an Excel Workbook that you have stored in a Files tool, and you save it back to Groove after every local change, each save to Groove will cause Groove to calculate the file changes and transmit them to all workspace endpoints. Save to Groove once or twice during your editing session.
  • Avoid retransmissions: Stay online during data transfer. If your outbound or inbound counters are active, stay online in Groove until they stop. This is especially important when you are receiving a workspace or sending a workspace to a new member or endpoint. (See note on invitations for details.) Transmission and Receive counters probably won't drop to zero. If you have changes that can't be transmitted (for example, if a workspace member is offline) the transmission counter will reflect that. In that situation, if you shut down Groove and delete your transmission queue, Groove will reconstruct what needs to be transmitted and put it back in the queue. The deletion will not save space, and it will generate additional processor use.

Note on invitations: When someone accepts your invitation to a workspace, Groove packages up all of your workspace data to transmit. (This is at the root of the 2 GB invitation limit.) Because workspace data not static, this data must be sent all together, so the recipient is at a known point in workspace synchronization. If the workspace transmission is interrupted, it cannot be resumed. However, since all of the workspace went into the transmission queue, it will still all be transmitted. The receiving Groove installation will then discard the received data and request a current copy.

References

"Information about synchronization alerts in Groove"  https://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;913614

"The outgoing data counter may show a larger volume of data being transmitted than the data that you added to a workspace in Groove" https://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;917180