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Managing AEM Repository Size Growth by Anuj Gangwar

Abstract

Managing your AEM repository size growth can be challenging for numerous reasons. What’s more, it may suddenly start to grow unexpectedly and fill up space in the assigned drive of your AEM application.

In this post, I want to share a few AEM utilities & methods which can help you to not only manage the AEM repository size but also help to improve the AEM application performance.

1: Tar Compaction (also known as Revision Cleanup)
By running the regular tar compaction, you can not only control the AEM repository size growth, but it will also help improve the AEM application performance. Tar compaction reclaims the disk space by removing the obsolete/redundant data from your AEM application. You can use both online and offline compaction. You can schedule online Tar compaction during weekdays after business hours & offline compaction on weekends (Non-business hours or during your designated Maintenance Window).

2: Garbage Collection
By running the data store garbage collection regularly, we can remove the unreferenced data from your AEM application which will help reduce the AEM application repo size. Whenever we delete any data (such as Assets, packages, etc.) from the AEM application, it gets deleted from the AEM frontend hierarchy but not from the AEM application database. To delete these unreferenced data, AEM provides the data store garbage collection process.

3: Workflow Purge
Performing a workflow purge may not reduce the AEM repository size, but it can help improve AEM application performance. With the help of a workflow purge scheduler, you can schedule it during your maintenance hours.

4: Audit Log Maintenance Task
Audit log increases rapidly whenever qualified AEM events (like assets, pages activation, deletion, and uploading asset) happen. Purging these logs periodically can help reduce the AEM repository size. You can schedule audit log purge using Pages audit Log Purge Rule in the OSGi configuration.

5: Version Purge
If version manager is enabled in your AEM instance, the version purge tool should ideally be used because the versions created by the author never get deleted which causes the repository size growth. By using the version purge tool, you can define the number of max versions that you want to keep in the repository and the age of versions. Anything older or greater that is removed helps to reduce the AEM repository size.

6: Regular Log Rotation
Log file rotation should ideally be enabled in your instance to rotate the log files periodically. You can use Apache Sling Logging Configuration to define the number of log files that you want to be retained.

7: Periodic Unused Asset Cleanup
With the help of the authoring team, you can identify, archive, and delete the older Assets (such as images, videos, pdfs, etc.) which are not being used anymore on any pages. You can even back these assets up in the backup drive on the server, in case there is ever a need in the future.

8: Periodic Package Cleanup
Deleting the older packages (like older builds deployment packages, content packages, etc.) can also go a long way in reducing the AEM repository size. Packages that are already installed can safely be removed from the package manager. These older packages can be identified and cleaned up periodically.

I hope you found this post useful in understanding the many ways to reduce your AEM repository size. This should help improve your AEM application performance and enable it to run more smoothly. Let me know if you have any additional questions in the comments below. Don’t forget to check out more of our Adobe blogs!

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Managing AEM Repository Size Growth

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