topic contentstore: unnecessary file duplication in Alfresco Archive

contentstore: unnecessary file duplication

qasimh — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 17:21:38 GMT

Hi,I'm using Alfresco 2.0 CE, on Windows Server 2003, Tomcat, and MS SQL Server.As I was debugging something, I noticed that the files in the contentstore folder do not get cleaned up after a modification.Using the NodeBrowser to find the contentURL and examining alf_data/contentstore, I see that fi

Re: contentstore: unnecessary file duplication

amar — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 10:57:17 GMT

Did you have an explanation for this problem.
I noticed the same pb (without versionning)
Amar

Re: contentstore: unnecessary file duplication

qasimh — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:12:58 GMT

Did you have an explanation for this problem.
I noticed the same pb (without versionning)
Amar

Nope… no responses, no advice, no followups

Re: contentstore: unnecessary file duplication

ero — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 14:18:57 GMT

Hi,

IMHO, that's an Alfresco implementation choice to never modify any content file stored on a content store but creates systematically a new content copy, the latter being updated and associated with current metadata (old file content becoming de facto an orphan content if not any versionning has been defined).
It guarantees you that Alfresco will never implicitly delete any "valid" content.

To keep things clean, if I'm not wrong (to be confirmed), there is a scheduled cleaner job which will detect (in other things) any obsolete (orphan) file content and will delete it automatically.

Hope it helps you.

Re: contentstore: unnecessary file duplication

qasimh — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:32:18 GMT

Thank you ERo.

Do you know anything more about this scheduled job that's supposed to take care of these orphaned nodes/content?

We deployed Alfresco about 6 months back and the alf_data repository is currently 4GB large. I know it's not much now, but we only have about 1.0-1.5 GB of valid content in there (very little of it is auto-versioned).

For the first time since the deployment, I permananently removed old deleted content (from the web-ui)… about 1-1.5K files (total size > hundreds of MBs). However, the alf_data folder size has not changed at all.

As things are now, it all seems terribly inefficient and inpractical. As this content continues to grow, disk ineffeciencies are bound to creep up.

Any insight on this matter will be greatly appreciated …. uhm uhm (Alfresco Engineers).
-Q

Re: contentstore: unnecessary file duplication

qasimh — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 00:36:58 GMT

I found the scheduler that is supposed to clean the content store:
WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/scheduled-jobs-context.xml

I see lots of beans that might help clean up things…. I I'll start looking into this .

-Q

Re: contentstore: unnecessary file duplication

ero — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:15:09 GMT

Hi Q,

That job is absolutely necessary to keep clean Alfresco repository (e.g. CIFS protocol being not transactionnal, if you are uploading some content and your network connexion goes down during upload process, the repository will become inconsistent (you will see metadata in the Web UI but you will be unable to access any content)).

You are right, scheduled-jobs-context.xml file is the file you can customize.
For the rest, you will find all cleaner job related Java code in :
HEAD\root\projects\repository\source\java\org\alfresco\repo\content\cleanup
and all file content store java code (content deletion implementation) in :
HEAD\root\projects\repository\source\java\org\alfresco\repo\content\filestore
(FileContentStore.java)

Regards,

ERo