On our root BES Server (7.2.5.22), the download folder checks in at 200GB+ and it seems like we need to do some cleaning. I found the fixlet “WARNING: BES Server/Relays Have Too Many Download Folders” and I’m considering running it. However, I’m somewhat concerned by warning:
Warning! If a BES Client requests a download after the download folder has been deleted, the BES Server and BES Relays will fail to process the download request and the BES Client will be stuck in a ‘Pending Downloads’ status for that action. You must issue a new action or stop and restart the action to correct this problem.
This seems like a very bad thing for us, because we have 1000+ open actions, and restarting all of them is not an option. How can we safely cleanup the download folder without breaking any actions that are already open?
Also, we have a lot of expired actions. I was going to remove them, but now I’m wondering if I should run this fixlet first before removing them. Does it matter?
I delete expired actions on a regular basis for performance reasons, just keeping enough for month or so of history.
For cleaning the download folders, you could check if any actions have a mirror in progress before and immediately following taking that action. That would pin point the actions that may require a restart if there were any. Most of them that have been open for some time should have long since mirrored and are in the cache. Using http://127.0.0.1:52311/cgi-bin/bfenterprise/besmirrorrequest.exe from your browser on root server or change URL to the relays and refreshing gives you the state of the mirroring.
The Fixlet for Too Many Download Folders shouldn’t be relevant on 7.2.5.22 and won’t work. It is geared more for cleaning up large numbers of folders but you are more concerned with the size of the data here so I would suggest checking the size of this folder:
If all of the disk space is being used here, it just means that you have configured the BES Server cache size to be really large and we’re using it.
If the disk space is being used up by other folders in the downloads folder, something else may be going on. Like, there could be lots of large downloads stuck in progress that didn’t complete and didn’t get cleaned up either.