Greenplum Building Blocks(GBB) - root partition is getting full

Products

• VMware Tanzu Greenplum
• VMware Tanzu Greenplum / Gemfire

Issue/Introduction

With Greenplum Building Blocks(GBB), you may notice that the root partition uses more space that would be expected and it grows significantly over time.

Environment

Greenplum Building Blocks (GBB)

Resolution

Upon checking, we found that it was a /var/log directory and more precisely, /var/log/pcp/pmlogger/, thaAfter checking the processes, we found that this directory is used by pmlogger. pmlogger creates an archive log for performance metrics.

pmlogger and pmcd, which are part of the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP), are turned on by default when a GBB cluster is installed. They are not directly related to Greenplum and it would be the customer to choose whether they want to keep it.

Since the system was having space issues, it was advised to turn it off by OS administrator.

See RedHat documentation on Configuring performance monitoring with PCP by using RHEL system roles for more details