Need a solution to clean up Bamboo remote agent boxes

[Nikhil Kumar]

Hello Everyone,

Our bamboo remote agents are running out of space quite often and we are seeing that "/xml-data/build-dir" is using around 26G.

Whats the best way to clean up this this directory ? 

FYI: We've enabled force clean build on source code checkout task on all build jobs.

And we would like to enable "Override global build expiry configuration" does it help cleaning up existing files in "/xml-data/build-dir" ?

[Daniel Santos]

Hi @Nikhil Kumar

All the content from xml-data/build-dir can be removed if there is no build running there. This is the data stored there:

• Build files created during the build, along with a local copy of the latest changes of the affected source repositories
• Agent cache for each source repository that eventually was run in the remote agent
  • build-dir/_git-repositories-cache
  • build-dir/_hg-repositories-cache
  • ...

The Bamboo build expiry does not remove files from remote agents. We do have a feature request for this: [BAM-13679] Optional build expiry for remote agents.

Plans and deployments that were removed from the server are also not removed from the remote agents. This is another feature request, but more popular: [BAM-13589] Agents should remove workspaces for plans that no longer exist.

Workaround

From time to time stop the agent and remove the content from xml-data/build-dir that is not used for a long time. It can include the repository cache folders. If you accidentally remove a repository cache that is still used the only penalty you will suffer is a long build time when you run the next build. This will happen because the agent will need to recreate the cache.

Please let me know if you have more questions on this matter.