AEM Instance Disk Space

[RedMen88]

One of our AEM instance environments is completely out of disk space. IWe have been deleting old packages with a high file size, however, the disk usage stays the same. Do we need to run maintenance after deleting packages? Also while deploying to this instance we get this error: 

java.io.IOException: No space left on device

[Jörg_Hoh · Accepted solution]

Hi,

yes, you should run offline compaction and datastore garbage collection. In your specific case in a different order:

1. shutdown the instance
2. run Datastore GC
3. run offline compaction
4. run Datastore GC again

Offline compaction needs free disk space (in the size of the segment store = tar files); that's the reason why I recommend to run Datatstore GC before trying to free up space upfront.

On the other hand: If you can attach temporarily more disk space, you can omit step 1.

But never forget: Monitor your disk usage!

[bobkranson]

Depending on the operating system too, you might require a restart of the OS as well as the AEM instance maintenance.  A little info from the Red Hat site:

• On Linux or Unix systems, deleting a file via rm or through a file manager application will unlink the file from the file system's directory structure; however, if the file is still open (in use by a running process) it will still be accessible to this process and will continue to occupy space on disk. Therefore such processes may need to be restarted before that file's space will be cleared up on the filesystem.