Monthly Maintenance

Modified on Mon, 08 Jan 2024 at 02:17 PM

Store admins can run periodic maintenance which is necessary for keeping the store running smoothly and quickly. For many tasks, store admins can choose whether to do that maintenance for all records, no records, or only records older than n days old. Multiple actions can be performed at once. This maintenance process should be executed during off-peak hours, as various parts of the database may be temporarily locked during maintenance, preventing customers from using the site normally.

From the Configuration menu, click Monthly Maintenance. These tasks can take a while to complete, especially if the gap between occurrences is large. Once you click Go to start the process, do not interact with the admin site until you see the completed message. All currently logged-in admin users will be logged out.

Despite its name, for security reasons we recommend that this maintenance is run as frequently as possible to keep your database free of 'at-risk' data.

Option Name	Description
Clear Shopping Carts	This will clear the contents of any saved customer shopping carts older than the age selected. If you have changed prices on your store or discontinued items, you may wish to do this to ensure that customers do not check out with products/prices they should not get because they added them before they change.
Clear Wish Lists	This will clear the contents of any saved customer wish lists older than the age selected. If you have changed prices on your store or discontinued items, you may wish to do this to ensure that customers do not check out with products/prices they should not get because they added them before they change.
Erase Credit Cards/eCheck from Order Records	This option will remove the (encrypted) CC information from order records older than the date selected. This information is generally not required after the initial purchase is made, so storing it presents an unnecessary risk.
Clear Profiles	This option clears the customer Profile which stores the cookie data and site settings for customers. Although it is generally safe to delete all Profile data, it is best to retain the last 30 days.
Clear Product Views	This option clears the customer product views, which are saved for uses such as dynamic related products. You may not want to clear these ("leave unchanged")
Clear RT Shipping Request/Response	This option clears the RTShippingRequests and RTShippingResponses stored in the database.
Clear Search Logs	If activated, all search logs older than the period you specify will be removed from the database.
Purge Anon Customers	This will clear the records of anonymous customers - customers who performed an action on your site that caused a temporary record to be created for them (added to the cart, chose a locale, etc) but never registered or checked out. These records are not necessary and clearing them will not hurt the store.
Erase Credit Card/eCheck info from Address records	If your site is storing credit card numbers, customers who have allowed their information to be stored will have their credit card info in their Address records, completely separate from any orders they've placed. This option will clear that information out of your database.
Purge all records that are marked as Deleted	Many of the Delete buttons in the store admin site do not actually permanently remove the selected object (products, customers, etc). Those things are just marked as deleted in the database, and no longer appear in the admin site. This is so that they can be recovered in the future if necessary. If you wish to permanently remove those records, this option will do so.
Purge aged user data	Beginning in version 10.0.15 - Anonymizes inactive Customer and Order records
Tune Indexes	This option performs basic maintenance on your database, which can increase site performance.
Update Statistics	This option updates information that SQL Server uses for optimizing queries run against your database. Checking this option when running maintenance can increase site performance, but will cause maintenance to take longer to complete.
Clear old Localization Data	If checked, data for locales that no longer exist will be removed from the LocalizedObjectName database table. Note that this only affects localization data used for the product and entity grids in the admin console.
Save Settings	This option saves your selections on this page, so that you can quickly perform the same tasks next time maintenance needs to be run.

If your database is too large for Monthly Maintenance to be run from within the admin console (times out or throws error), submit a new ticket and our support team and we will assist in helping to run the monthly maintenance on your site.