Pulp storage not reclaimed after destroying repos/remotes/distributions

[VrindaMarwah]

I synced a combination of RPMs, container images etc. into Pulp. After the sync, disk usage under /var/lib/pulp grew to ~29 GB (see screenshot).

I then destroyed everything using the respective pulp commands:

pulp rpm distribution destroy --name <rpm_distribution_name>
pulp rpm remote destroy --name <rpm_remote_name>
pulp rpm repository destroy --name <rpm_repository_name>

pulp container distribution destroy --name <container_distribution_name>
pulp container remote destroy --name <container_remote_name>
pulp container repository destroy --name <container_repository_name>

I verified via Pulp CLI that all repositories, remotes, and distributions are destroyed successfully— all list commands now return {}.

However, the storage under /var/lib/pulp is still ~29 GB and hasn’t been reclaimed.

Question: Why is disk space not freed even after all repos/remotes/distributions are destroyed? Is there an additional cleanup or orphan-artifact removal step required?

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I synced a combination of RPMs, container images, tarballs etc to Pulp and pulp storage under /var/lib/pulp is 29G initially (screenshot below):

I destroyed the artifacts using respoective commands for:
distribution destroy, remote destroy, repository destroy

Verfied with pulp commands and all commands to list repos, remote, distributions are coming as returning {}

But pulp storage is still at 29G.

Why?

[dralley]

Because artifacts can be shared between repos, they aren't collected automatically, you need to run pulp orphan cleanup in order to have "orphaned" content / artifacts cleaned up.

There is also a "protection time", though, because it is possible that a user could be uploading artifacts and content to add to a repo subsequently. So if you want to clean everything up immediately after deleting a repo without waiting for the timeout, pulp orphan cleanup --protection-time 0

[VrindaMarwah]

@dralley thanks for helping out. I tried the above activity:
Initially my pulp storage was 30G (screenshot below):

I ran cleanup for one of the rpm repositories:

pulp rpm distribution destroy --name x86_64_appstream
Started background task /pulp/api/v3/tasks/019c7454-8842-7602-b368-dc4252ebed85/
Done.

pulp rpm remote destroy --name x86_64_appstream
Started background task /pulp/api/v3/tasks/019c7454-c9f8-7ddc-b6a9-a1112946b589/
.Done.

pulp rpm repository destroy --name x86_64_appstream
Started background task /pulp/api/v3/tasks/019c7454-e94d-7982-a5f7-c440f42aa337/
.Done.

After this I went ahead and ran pulp orphan cleanup --protection-time 0

However, after orphan cleanup I still see the storage as 30G:

Can you help with why the pulp storage is still not deleted?

[gerrod3]

@VrindaMarwah Can you run orphan cleanup a second time? The first run showed it deleted 8000 content units, but only 400 artifacts and I would have expected that number to be way higher. If there are no repositories left on your system (pulp repository list) then all of the artifacts should be cleaned up. Inside the Pulp container you can run this command to see the size on disk of each repository: pulpcore-manager repository-size.