kubeletArguments:
minimum-container-ttl-duration:
- "10s"
maximum-dead-containers-per-container:
- "2"
maximum-dead-containers:
- "240"
The OpenShift Container Platform node performs two types of garbage collection:
Container garbage collection: Removes terminated containers.
Image garbage collection: Removes images not referenced by any running pods.
Container garbage collection is enabled by default and happens automatically in
response to eviction thresholds being reached. The node tries to keep any
container for any pod accessible from the API. If the pod has been deleted, the
containers will be as well. Containers are preserved as long the pod is not
deleted and the eviction threshold is not reached. If the node is under disk
pressure, it will remove containers and their logs will no longer be accessible
via oc logs
.
The policy for container garbage collection is based on three node settings:
Setting | Description |
---|---|
|
The minimum age that a container is eligible for garbage collection. The default is 0. Use 0 for no limit. Values for this setting can be specified using unit suffixes such as h for hour, m for minutes, s for seconds. |
|
The number of instances to retain per pod container. The default is 1. |
|
The maximum number of total dead containers in the node. The default is -1, which means unlimited. |
The maximum-dead-containers
setting takes precedence over the
maximum-dead-containers-per-container
setting when there is a conflict. For
example, if retaining the number of maximum-dead-containers-per-container
would result in a total number of containers that is greater than
maximum-dead-containers
, the oldest containers will be removed to satisfy
the maximum-dead-containers
limit.
When the node removes the dead containers, all files inside those containers are removed as well. Only containers created by the node will be garbage collected.
You can specify values for these settings in the kubeletArguments
section of
the /etc/origin/node/node-config.yaml file on node hosts. Add the section if
it does not already exist:
kubeletArguments:
minimum-container-ttl-duration:
- "10s"
maximum-dead-containers-per-container:
- "2"
maximum-dead-containers:
- "240"
Each spin of the garbage collector loop goes through the following steps:
Retrieve a list of available containers.
Filter out all containers that are running or are not alive longer than
the minimum-container-ttl-duration
parameter.
Classify all remaining containers into equivalence classes based on pod and image name membership.
Remove all unidentified containers (containers that are managed by kubelet but their name is malformed).
For each class that contains more containers than the
maximum-dead-containers-per-container
parameter, sort containers in the class by
creation time.
Start removing containers from the oldest first until the
maximum-dead-containers-per-container
parameter is met.
If there are still more containers in the list than the
maximum-dead-containers
parameter, the collector starts removing containers
from each class so the number of containers in each one is not greater than the
average number of containers per class, or
<all_remaining_containers>/<number_of_classes>
.
If this is still not enough, sort all containers in the list and start
removing containers from the oldest first until the maximum-dead-containers
criterion is met.
Update the default settings to meet your needs. Garbage collection only removes the containers that do not have a pod associated with it. |
Image garbage collection relies on disk usage as reported by cAdvisor on the node to decide which images to remove from the node. It takes the following settings into consideration:
Setting | Description |
---|---|
|
The percent of disk usage (expressed as an integer) which triggers image garbage collection. The default is 85. |
|
The percent of disk usage (expressed as an integer) to which image garbage collection attempts to free. Default is 80. |
You can specify values for these settings in the kubeletArguments
section of
the /etc/origin/node/node-config.yaml file on node hosts. Add the section if
it does not already exist:
kubeletArguments:
image-gc-high-threshold:
- "85"
image-gc-low-threshold:
- "80"
Two lists of images are retrieved in each garbage collector run:
A list of images currently running in at least one pod
A list of images available on a host
As new containers are run, new images appear. All images are marked with a time stamp. If the image is running (the first list above) or is newly detected (the second list above), it is marked with the current time. The remaining images are already marked from the previous spins. All images are then sorted by the time stamp.
Once the collection starts, the oldest images get deleted first until the stopping criterion is met.