[Spacewalk-list] deleting packages

[David Nutter]

On Wed, Nov 03, 2010 at 12:45:52PM +0100, Marcus Moeller wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> we got now about 60.000 packages in no channel (due to deletion of old
> Fedora releases). It is not possible to delete them, neither via gui
> nor via api (which stucks during
> channel.software.listPackagesWithoutChannel either with a 502 Proxy
> Error, a connection timeout or a 500 Internal Server Error). Any idea
> how to get rid of these packages?

When deleting old releases I find I have to do them bit by bit rather
than all at once. I've encountered two errors caused by trying to
delete large numbers of packages all at once and leading to a 500
error. Never seen a 502 in this situation though. The errors are

1) Oracle's UNDO tablespace is exhausted. Give it some more, this
   doesn't count to your 4Gb limit
2) The delete process itself takes too long to run, and causes a
   timeout. This is the situation where deleting in small batches may
   help.

In my case at least at least part of the problem is a slightly
underspecced VM for spacewalk: for most operation it's fine but big
pushes or deletions seem to overstretch it. 

Regards,

-- 
David Nutter  				Tel: +44 (0)131 650 4888
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