Keeping Domino Servers from Consuming Unnecessary Disk Space

I had a customer contact me recently asking about identifying why one of their IBM i LPARs had so much additional disk space consumed compared to another LPAR that hosted the Domino cluster mates.  The primary server hosted 4 Domino servers and the secondary LPAR hosted only 2 Domino servers.  The two additional servers on the primary LPAR were both Sametime Community servers, which typically don’t consume much disk space.

I used the disk usage utility to collect information on how much disk space each Domino server consumed.  The output is in the table below.

The Domino servers on the primary LPAR were consuming 843.34 GB more disk space than the servers on the secondary LPAR.  The two Sametime servers were a minuscule portion of this  discrepancy.  There were some databases on the primary servers (MAIL03 and COLLAB03) that were not on the cluster mates, however those databases only accounted for about 150 GB of space.  So what was causing such a disparity in the amount of space the primary servers were consuming compared to the secondary servers?

The culprit turned out to be the data in the IBM_TECHNICAL_SUPPORT subdirectory of the MAIL03 server.  This subdirectory alone was consuming 643 GB of disk space and contained 10,641 files.  My customer asked the best way to clean the directory up and how to prevent this run away disk space situation from happening in the future.  This is very easy to accomplish through a feature that has been in the product for many years but is rarely activated.

The feature is enabled in the Configuration Document on the Diagnostics tab.  Set the parameter ‘Remove diagnostic files after a specified number of days‘ to “Yes” and then specify the number of days diagnostic files can remain on the server in the ‘Number of days to keep diagnostic files‘ parameter.  The default is 365 days.  This can be set to a lower value.  I would recommend keeping at least 30 days of diagnostic data, maybe even 60 to 90 days.

The graphic above shows adding this to the Default Configuration document so all Domino servers in the domain inherit this setting, however it can be set for a specific server as well by editing the Configuration Document for that one server.

It’s that simple!