Managing Garbage Collection

Phabricator User Documentation (Configuration)

Understanding and configuring garbage collection.

Overview

Phabricator generates various logs and caches during normal operation. Some of these logs and caches are usually of very little use after some time has passed, so they are deleted automatically (often after a month or two) in a process called "garbage collection".

Garbage collection is performed automatically by the daemons. You can review all of the installed garbage collectors by browsing to Config → Garbage Collectors.

Configuring Retention Policies

You can reconfigure the data retention policies for most collectors.

The default retention policies should be suitable for most installs. However, you might want to decrease retention to reduce the amount of disk space used by some high-volume log that you don't find particularly interesting, or to adhere to an organizational data retention policy.

Alternatively, you might want to increase retention if you want to retain some logs for a longer period of time, perhaps for auditing or analytic purposes.

You can review the current retention policies in Config → Garbage Collectors. To change a policy, use bin/garbage set-policy to select a new policy:

phabricator/ $ ./bin/garbage set-policy --collector cache.markup --days 7

You can use --days to select how long data is retained for. You can also use --indefinite to set an indefinite retention policy. This will stop the garbage collector from cleaning up any data. Finally, you can use --default to restore the default policy.

Your changes should be reflected in the web UI immediately, and will take effect in the actual collector the next time the daemons are restarted.

Troubleshooting

You can manually run a collector with bin/garbage collect.

phabricator/ $ ./bin/garbage collect --collector cache.general

By using the --trace flag, you can inspect the operation of the collector in detail.

Next Steps

Continue by:

• exploring other daemon topics with Managing Daemons with phd.