Remove orphaned (dangling) entity references when an entity is deleted

Acquia docs link to this issue as the cause of surprisingly large DB tables belonging to their Cohesion system.. On a site I looked at there were 63K nodes, 75K node revisions, and the table cohesion_layout_revision was 630MB in size. (This was larger than the entire Drupal codebase and the remainder of the site DB put together.)

Adding Acquia's Cohesion table to the "examples of this problem" list in ID.

I made a contrib module that takes care of deleting references: https://www.drupal.org/project/entity_reference_delete →

In addition to #30:

• https://www.drupal.org/project/entity_reference_purger →
• https://www.drupal.org/project/cer/ →

I agree, references need a functionality like databases have to track references and remove orphans and it should be in core. Still I understand the complexities ;)

#31: +1
We have been using Entity Reference Purger → in production for over a year. The module addresses exactly the issue described in the original post. In our usecase, the number of references to be deleted is typically in the triple digits, without any significant performance issues.