SQL Lite error: `SQLITE_FULL: database or disk is full

Questions
1

After fixing SQL Lite error: `SQLITE_FULL: database or disk is full. btw shoutout to @Jon and @AlGryt because only this method worked for me Sqlite cleanup (prune + vacuum.

After the fix I’ve added the following values to my docker-compose.yml file to prevent similar situations in the future.

  - EXECUTIONS_DATA_SAVE_ON_ERROR=all
  - EXECUTIONS_DATA_SAVE_ON_PROGRESS=true
  - EXECUTIONS_DATA_SAVE_MANUAL_EXECUTIONS=true
  - EXECUTIONS_DATA_PRUNE=true
  - EXECUTIONS_DATA_MAX_AGE=72
  - DB_SQLITE_VACUUM_ON_STARTUP=true

Anyway, when I was going around my server I saw two files/ folders that are huge 5GB each and it does not seem normal but I’ reluctant to just delete them.

The files under overlay

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Perhaps someone knows if they are needed and if they are not needed, can suggest how to delete them and how to prevent something like that happening again?

Thank you in advance!

2

Part of Docker’s OverlayFS storage driver, specifically used for managing the file system layers of containers.

  • merged/ is what the container sees as its full file system.
  • It’s created when the container starts and removed when it stops.
  • If a container is running, you can look in merged/ to inspect its full file system from the host.
3

Hey @Franz, thank you for the fast response.

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After having an extensive conversation with Claude, here is what the AI told me.

‘’ I found that while df -h showed both overlay mounts as 5.4GB each, this was misleading - it was showing the total filesystem size available to Docker, not what each container actually uses.

When I inspected the containers using:

bash

Copy Code

docker inspect | grep -A 3 MergedDir

I could identify exactly which overlay directory belonged to which container. Then using du -h on those directories, I discovered my n8n container actually uses 1.1GB (mostly Node.js modules) and Traefik only 184MB.

The docker system df -v command revealed more details - my total Docker usage is 4.9GB, with 2.677GB in the n8n_data volume and 2.4GB in overlay2.

So those large overlay directories are completely normal and just part of how Docker’s storage works - as you said, they’re what the containers see as their filesystems.‘’

What’s concerning me is that when I do a snapshot of the server the total size its 10+GB, which seems a bit unusual to me to be honest.

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its not a huge issue right now, but I want to prevent it from becoming an issue in the future.

Let me know if I’ missing something.

Appreciate the help!

4

One more thing that I forgot to mention.

I vaccumed the database so it went down to 12 MB. about 10 hours later it is back to 2.5GB. I’m not sure what is causing it to grow so fast.

This is my docker-compose.yml file

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5

This depends on your workflows and with how data you are dealing.
I think thatEXECUTIONS_DATA_SAVE_ON_PROGRESS saves the data of each node of an executed workflow. Dealing with binary files or many items in a single workflow could cause this issue. If you don’t need it, just try remove it or set it to false.