Quick heads-up if you’re keeping an eye on your DB size in the recent core: our backup ballooned by 1.1 GB in just three weeks. I traced it to one table browser_pageview_events which grew to 10M+ rows (~10 GB) in about a month.
Here’s the deal: this table fills up by default because persist_browser_pageview_events is true, while the cleanup option (clean_up_browser_pageview_events) is false by default. In other words, out-of-the-box, core just keeps piling up pageview events and never deletes them.
Both settings are hidden, so you won’t see them on the admin settings page. To enable cleanup, run this in the Rails console:
SiteSetting.clean_up_browser_pageview_events = true
Once enabled, the retention period is set to 3 months.
Is false really the intended default? It might make sense to avoid silently deleting analytics on existing sites, but it means every site built since May 12, 2026 (core commit 39e21d063c9), keeps accumulating data without any ceiling, and you won’t see any obvious setting to warn you.