Deleting executions via the UI from my n8n instance seems to cause high CPU usage. After some time of a maxed out CPU, I decide to redeploy the instance. Once redeployed the CPU is back to normal but executions selected do not seem to be deleted. Does anyone have any ideas on why this is occuring? Should I just start a new instance from scratch and import my existing workflows?
n8n setup
n8n version: 0.217.2
Database: SQLite
Running n8n with the execution process: main
Running n8n via: Docker
Additional info
using a Raspberry Pi 4B on Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS
I have been deleting executions from the UI, unsure how I can delete executions from CLI looking at the docs or from directly within the sqlite database. Could you provide some examples on how this can be done?
Thanks to @BramKn and @jonflow, I’ve deleted all executions with these steps now:
Ensure instance is offline.
Keep a backup of existing .n8n directory by using mv .n8n/ .n8n.bak
Since I use sqlite as my database of choice, I access my database with sqlite3 database.sqlite
Since I want to delete all executions to date, I run DELETE FROM execution_entity WHERE startedAt <= date('now');
Quit sqlite client with .quit
(Optional) If using N8N_DEFAULT_BINARY_DATA_MODE=filesystem, you can delete the binaryData directory too as all related executions will already be deleted from the step 4 command. From my experience, the binaryData directory was quite large (7.5GB), as it contains the files of past executions, so deleting this reclaimed 99% of the space.