Excessive Disk Usage - EE v. 4.0.12

My EE install was filling up 92% my VPS’ 25 gig drive. I wanted to post this because I spent some time chasing down the issue and hadn’t found an explicit fix on the forum.

Problem 1: Clean up old docker images
Originally I had ~2.5gb of reclaimable space. This post gave me a starting point. You can run the below command to see how much space docker is able to reclaim.

$ sudo docker system df
TYPE                TOTAL               ACTIVE              SIZE                RECLAIMABLE
Images              7                   7                   1.92GB              55.27MB (2%)
Containers          7                   7                   8.54kB              0B (0%)
Local Volumes       22                  22                  332.8MB             0B (0%)
Build Cache         0                   0                   0B                  0B

You can then run

$ sudo docker system prune -af

to removed the extraneous images. Make sure to append the “-a” portion, to remove all unused images not just dangling ones (see docker system prune --help).

Problem 2: Gigantic log file in /var/lib/docker
That cleared up a couple of gigs, but I still had a lot more disk space being used than I would expect:

$ df -h /
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1        25G   19G  4.9G  80% /

After some digging I found a post on redhat that corresponded to /var/lib/docker taking up 17 gb.

$ sudo find /var/lib/docker/containers/ -name "*.log" -exec ls -sha {} \; | sort -hk1 -r | head -1
12G /var/lib/docker/containers/CONTAINER-ID/CONTAINER-ID-json.log

Then I truncated the log file above down to 10 mb (replacing CONTAINER-ID with the correct text):

$ sudo truncate -s 10M /var/lib/docker/containers/CONTAINER-ID/CONTAINER-ID-json.log
$ sudo df -h /
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1        25G  6.7G   17G  29% /

Back down to a reasonable size at last!

This probably isn’t an ideal solution, but until I find a cleaner solution I just added the following as a root cron job:

0 4 * * * find /var/lib/docker/containers/ -iname "*-json.log" -exec truncate -s 10M {} \;

It simply truncates all *-json.log files in /var/lib/docker/containers/ down to 10M. IF you want to do the same, just $ sudo crontab -e and modify the above to your liking.

Hopefully this helps someone else who had a similar issue. Cheers.

2 Likes

I would recommend running the commands in this post to validate all of your EE required containers are running. If one of the EE required containers is not running and you use the -a command, it will get rid of the container.

Thank you very much!