Gluster users - Aug 2023 - .glusterfs is over 900GB

Hey y'all, got a weird one for you.

I am unfortunately supporting this really weird Gluster volume, where it's a
single-brick/single-node volume that has many files written every minute to it.
Its very suboptimal, but I'm kind of stuck with it until the application
team migrates off Linux 5 (yes... I know). gluster-server is running version
6.10, gluster-client is mounting via NFS as 3.6 is not compatible with
gluster-server 6.10.

Anyways, the actual content of the volume is maybe a total of 15GB, but the
.glusterfs directory is over 900GB, full of backups of the files? I feel that
it's probably related to being unable to self-heal because it's only one
volume, but then these files still just live out there.

Can I safely delete them? Should I be doing something else? Do I just deal with
it until I can get the client server off Linux 5?

Thanks!

Tim King-Kehl


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On Mon, Aug 14, 2023 at 03:49:05PM +0000, Tim King-Kehl
wrote:
> Hey y'all, got a weird one for you.
> 
> I am unfortunately supporting this really weird Gluster volume, where
it's a single-brick/single-node volume that has many files written every
minute to it. Its very suboptimal, but I'm kind of stuck with it until the
application team migrates off Linux 5 (yes... I know). gluster-server is running
version 6.10, gluster-client is mounting via NFS as 3.6 is not compatible with
gluster-server 6.10.
> 
> Anyways, the actual content of the volume is maybe a total of 15GB, but the
.glusterfs directory is over 900GB, full of backups of the files? I feel that
it's probably related to being unable to self-heal because it's only one
volume, but then these files still just live out there.
Curious question: If this
 - is a single brick, single node gluster system
 - whose storage is mounted over NFS anyway
Why don't you just convert the whole thing to a standard local filesystem
served via NFS and rip out the gluster bits, since you are not gaining
any of the advantages of it and just get more headaches?

And 15G is a tiny amount of storage by todays measures, so this should
be pretty simple and fast to migrate. Keep the same NFS export path so
the client won't even notice anything ;-)

Kind regards,
           Alex.
-- 
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
 looks like work."                                      -- Thomas A. Edison