The cleaner service is a two-cell component consisting of cleaner-disk and cleaner-hsm that watches for files being deleted in the namespace. When files are deleted, the cleaner-disk cell will notify the pools that hold a copy of the deleted files' data and tell the pools to remove that data. Optionally, the cleaner-hsm, when present, can instruct HSM-attached pools to remove copies of the file's data stored on tape.
The cleaner components run periodically, so there may be a delay between a file being deleted in the namespace and the corresponding deletion of that file's data in pools and on tape.
The cleaner services can be run in high availability (HA) mode (coordinated via ZooKeeper) by having several cleaner-disk and cleaner-hsm cells in a dCache instance, which need to share the same database. Only one such cleaner instance per type (disk or hsm) will be active at any point in time. If the currently active one ("master") is unavailable, another one is automatically taking its place.
The cleaner-disk is responsible for removing disk-resident file replicas.
The property cleaner-disk.limits.threads controls the number of pools processed in parallel.
The cleaner-disk.limits.batch-size property places an upper limit on the number of files' data to be deleted in a message. If more than this number of files are to be deleted then the pool will receive multiple messages.
The cleaner-hsm is responsible for removing tape-resident file replicas by instructing HSM-attached pools to remove deleted files' data stored in the HSM. To enable this feature, the property must be enabled at all the pools that are supposed to delete files from an HSM.
The cleaner-hsm component runs sequentially by sending cleaner-hsm.limits.batch-size delete targets in a message to an hsm-connected pool. It does so per hsm.
Regularly, it fetches hsm locations of files to delete from the database and caches them for clustering by hsm. In order to not overload the memory of a cleaner-hsm cell, the number of hsm delete locations that are cached at any point in time should be limited. The cleaner-hsm.limits.max-cached-locations = 12000 allows to set such a limit.
When a pool reports back to cleaner-hsm that it was unable to delete certain files, cleaner-hsm removes these entries from the local cache. They will be re-loaded into the locations cache eventually so that they can be retried.
Cleaner services use a database table called t_locationinfo_trash, often referred to as 'trash table'.
The field ipnfsid contains the pnfsid and ilocation the pool on which a replica is located.
The field itype stores the kind of delete entry:
0:hsm1:disk2:inode
The service cleaner-disk takes care of removing both disk locations from the database as well as inode ones once no other itype for a pnfsid exists.