Function and clean-up of imgEffects directory

[Rainer Pöhlmann]

On our Confluence Server instance, the "imgEffects" directory has grown to a reasonable size (47GB).

• What is the purpose of this directory? Which type of data a stored therein?
• Can it be safely cleaned-up (e.g. delete all files older 1 year or something like that)?

I could not find a useful piece of text that describes this directory in more detail.

Thanks a lot & best regards,

-Rainer

[Steven F Behnke · Accepted solution]

Yes you can purge old files. This is the borders effects generated for images. 

[Rainer Pöhlmann]

Thanks a lot for your fast reply.
Just for curiosity and not because I am not "trusting" your statement: is there an official reference about the purpose of this directory?

Thanks a lot, best,

-Rainer

[Steven F Behnke]

CONFSERVER-33048 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-33048

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-52626

Unfortunately I can find tickets but not documentation. 

[Rainer Pöhlmann]

Same for me. This was exactly the reason why I've been asking ;-)

Anyhow: thanks!

[Richard Cross]

Just to be clear:  what would happen if we purged all files in imgEffects? 

Would the image effects be lost forever, or would they regenerate on a visit to the page?

We're about to migrate from Server to Data Centre, and I want to pare down the local directories to minimise what has to be transferred over to the NFS share.

[Rainer Pöhlmann]

I explicitly tested it with 2 or 3 of them: delete and access again: they were re-created from scratch upon access.

Afterwards, I cleaned them up for all files older than 180 days (incl. empty sub-directories resulting from file cleaning) w/o any negative effect (Confluence Server). And I will repeat doing so every couple of months ;-)

Hope this helps, best,

-Rainer

[Richard Cross]

Thanks.

It's amazing... our confluence-home is around 200GB insize, and it appears we only need to keep about 100MB!

Of course we're a bit behind on migrating attachments to the filesystem from the database... once we do that, we're back to heavy filesystem load, I'm sure.

Kind regards,

Richard.