To post to this group, send email to mongodb-user googlegroups. Compact will not make anything smaller, in fact it will usually allocate a new extent in order to do its work. Think of compact as more like a defragmentation of the data, it leaves all padding in place. A repair removes all padding and essentially rewrites the data from scratch. So, you get everything in about as small a space as you can on disk. Because it removes padding and any empty, unused extents etc. Compact will not make anything smaller, in fact it will usually allocate a new extent in order to do its work. Think of compact as more like a defragmentation of the data, it leaves all padding in place. A repair removes all padding and essentially rewrites the data from scratch. So, you get everything in about as small a space as you can on disk. Because it removes padding and any empty, unused extents etc. Compare the padding factor on your first run, then the post repair it varies between 1 and 2 and you will see the obvious change. To post to this group, send email to mongodb-user googlegroups. Compact will not make anything smaller, in fact it will usually allocate a new extent in order to do its work. Think of compact as more like a defragmentation of the data, it leaves all padding mongodb greater than place. A repair removes all padding and essentially rewrites the data from scratch. So, you get everything in about as small a space as you can on disk. Because it removes padding and any empty, unused extents etc. Compare the padding factor on your first run, then the post repair it varies between 1 and 2 and you will see the obvious change. To post to this group, send email to mongodb-user googlegroups. To post to mongodb greater than group, send email to mongodb-user googlegroups. Wes Adam C Right - I updated that answer a couple of times too, until I got the information across properly. I answered the compact vs repair part first because that is the more common issue. I answered the compact vs repair part first because that is the more common issue. The size vs storageSize piece I had meant to mention as per that stackexchange articlebut only realized I had omitted it when you pointed it out : Adam John Wood maverin To avoid the confusion perhaps 10gen might consider renaming the command 'defrag' instead of compact. Compact will not make anything smaller, in fact it will usually allocate a new extent in order to do its work. Think of compact as more like a defragmentation of the data, it leaves all padding in place. A repair removes all padding and essentially rewrites the data from scratch. So, you mongodb greater than everything in about as small a space as you can on disk. Because it removes padding and any empty, unused extents etc. Compare the padding factor mongodb greater than your first run, then the post repair it varies between 1 and 2 and you will see the obvious change. Adam Adam C John - this might get some votes as an improvement request in Jira, though would be of relatively low priority. Also, we would have to keep compact for legacy reasons, essentially making it a request for an alias rather than a rename as such.