Right now there doesn't appear to any upper limit on the rate at which we can add rows to the RHQ_EVENT table. Unlike metric data for which collection intervals and number of resource in the inventory can be used to influence the rate at which that data comes in. For example, having multiple agents monitoring log files for which log entries are being written every millisecond ended up producing >17gb worth of data in the RHQ_EVENT table. Inserting this amount of data puts an excessive strain on the DB and most likely also makes subsequently purging the data impossible. 

The solution to this issue would be to ensure that "event floods" are not allowed to crush the database and that our event purge algorithm can support the rate at which event rows are added and also the total table size its possible to end up with.