Answer
Old revisions slow performance; compaction removes stale history.
Quick Answer
etcd stores all historical revisions of objects using MVCC. Over time, millions of old revisions accumulate, growing the etcd database size indefinitely. Compaction discards old revisions, keeping only the most recent. Without regular compaction, etcd db size grows until it hits the size quota (default 8GB), after which it refuses all writes — cluster-wide outage.
S
SugharaIQ Editorial Team
Verified Answer
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Source: SugharaIQ