The Power of Timestamps: Solving Database Growth in Chat Applications



While optimizing a chat system, I encountered a scalability issue: when storing actions such as delete or clear on every message per user .(This approach meant users could delete chats while retaining messages for other participants ) i discovered it could lead to massive database growth for group Chats. For instance, in a group chat with 11,000 messages, if 100 users each clear the chat, this would generate 1.1 million records—one action per user for every message.

To solve this, I leveraged timestamps in the participants table. Instead of logging a separate action relation for each message, a single timestamp marks all messages as cleared for that user. By updating just one record per action, this approach reduces record creation drastically, saving storage space and enhancing performance.