By default in the Audit Trail Cleaner batch size is 100,000. If I run the ATC from the GUI in the admin tool, will it stop after every batch of 100,000, and make me hit a key to continue? I am deleting almost 3 million rows. If I leave the batch size at 100,000 will I have to hit continue 30 times? It is important to know that the process will stop at 100,000 or whatever number I give it so that the transaction logs do not fill up.
No, once you confirm it will not prompt again. The Batch Size refers to SQL paging in the queries that it runs. When deleting a huge number of computers, you may get faster deletes by increasing the batch size, which may come at a cost of RAM or CPU usage.
I haven’t seen the transaction log as a problem, but if that really is the case you could force smaller sets of deleting by setting a longer number of days for history cleanup - for instance start at a year, then 10 months, then 8 months, etc. until you get to your target retention period.
Recently worked with a deployment that had been active since Bigfix 6 or 7, upgraded over the years and never had cleanup run before. Had billions of rows to delete, and we ended up increasing the batch size to something like a million rows at a time to get better performance, and started by deleting everything older than, I think 3 years, and worked our way current from there.
Thanks Jason, that is great information.
Do you set the Audit Trail Cleaner to run on a schedule? If so, what schedule do you recommend? I was going to schedule it to run every night after the nightly backup.
I generally run it nightly as well.