I'm working with a 2010 Farm that has an audit log just over 250 GB in size. They've tried running a powershell script using the SPAudit.DeleteEntried() but have found that it locks their tables and shut down their farm until they stopped it.
Some environments may be able to start the script and let it run overnight or on a weekend but that's not possible here. This farm is 24 X 7 for practical purposes.
As far as the timer job goes, to be safe I have to assume that it will have the same result as the powershell script. It's possible it approaches the process differently and won't lock, but I haven't been able to find anything that says that.
Of course from a dba point of view a person starts to think about doing a TRUNCATE, but that's not supported.
Before I place a call to Microsoft I wanted to drop the issue out here and see if anyone's seen any resources or guidelines for trimming extremely large audit logs.
Thanks,
Nate
Nate