Recently we had a major problem with the Author eating up disk space (> 110GB).
This was caused by the number of data*.tar files, in workspaces/crx.default/, increasing very rapidly BUT, the TAR Optimiser process was not able to keep up pace with it.
I asked DayCare if we could restore an online backup as a shortcut to removing the additional tar files. They said that would not help.
So, we just ran the TAR Optimiser process as much as we possibly could.
It was running at a rate of 1 tar file per 12 hours normally. But, over the weekend, that rate increased and it did manage to chew up ~200 data*.tar files. Amazing.
NB, When running the TAR Optimiser manually, I was able to set the delay from 1.0 milliseconds to 0.25 milliseconds - with a marked improvement in speed.
This delay parameter can be set in the workspace.xml file, so that it is used in your overnight schedule TAR Optimiser job, as follows :-
<PersistenceManager class="com.day.crx.persistence.tar.TarPersistenceManager">
<param name="optimizeSleep" value="0.25"/>
</PersistenceManager>
