Cleanup database when sitecore is running slow

One of my colleague had an issue today with his sitecore instance running incredibly slow on his conputer. Its was almost unusable. After some quick check on the app pool, log files, indexing and any customisation, I checked the Databases and I could see the Event Queue table was full of data. That was Sitecore 6.5.

So we started to cleanup the database table: History, Publishing Queue, Event Queue.
You can notice that there are agents running on your website that are cleaning up the data, but sometime, the data are getting too big and the agents were timing out... Just for reference, here are the agents definition:

      < agent interval="04:00:00" method="Run" type="Sitecore.Tasks.CleanupHistory">
      < !-- Agent to clean up publishing queue -->
      < agent interval="04:00:00" method="Run" type="Sitecore.Tasks.CleanupPublishQueue, Sitecore.Kernel">
        < daystokeep>30< /daystokeep>
      < /agent>
      < !-- Agent to clean up the event queue -->
      < agent interval="04:00:00" method="Run" type="Sitecore.Tasks.CleanupEventQueue, Sitecore.Kernel">
        < daystokeep>1< /daystokeep>
      < /agent>

You can also refer to the Sitecore Guide for more info.

So this post is just a quick reminder to always check the database status and clean it up sometime when doing development.