[chef] disk running out of space

[Spike Grobstein < >]

Hi

I've been running chef-server since about March of this year on our 
infrastructure for 81 nodes. After running out of space twice due to couchDB 
compaction being incorrectly configured, I finally got it working right, but 
I'm still beginning to run out of space at a rate of around 1.5GB per week.

I began poking around in the couchDB web UI and we've got over 11,000 
documents stored in the 'chef' database taking up 42GB. Looking at the docs, 
they're mostly 'sandbox' objects from what I can tell, with the occasional 
'data_bag' object. Also, the vast majority of the sandbox objects I've looked 
at have a 'create_time' of march or april of this year.

So my questions are:

1. is there any way to clean up these old documents
2. is there any way to prevent couchdb from getting larger? I have a 60GB 
disk allocated exclusively for couchdb data and that's a lot larger than I'd 
really like
3. could it be something else that's misconfigured?

Some details about the installation:

The server is Ubuntu and chef-server was installed via the OpsCode PPA. We're 
running chef 0.10.8.

I've got a couple of recipes that set node attributes when they run; 
primarily datestamps for when some recipes are run so they don't get run on a 
regular basis and things like that, but I'm not aware of anything else I 
could be doing that would cause such growth in the database.

Hopefully you guys can shed some light on this.

Thanks!



...spike