Installing Dockers on SSD (cache?)

[ConnerVT]

If I may ask, what do you have in appdata that is 800GB large?  Mine is 1/10th of that (81GB) and I have 36 Docker containers installed, 27 which run 24/7/365.

 

The conventional thinking for appdata is it contains configuration/logs and static resources needed for the container to run.  Having a backup of this is most useful not only for a major failure (such as a dead drive) but to recover if a container gets messed up by either human error (a reconfiguration gone wrong) or by automation (a bad update, for example).  Many times replacing a containers appdata folder puts things back to how they ran before.

 

If what is making your appdata so large is working data (such as media files for Plex, or photos for Immich/PhotoPrism), those would likely be better off being mapped to another share, somewhere outside of the appdata share.  It would then also allow you to use one of many backup options, where an incremental backup is done.

 

In either case, the best methodology is that any docker container that modifies the data being backed up is stopped before backing up the data.  Modifications done to the backup's source dataset during backup will make any verification check fail, as well as potentially corrupting the backed up data by it not being a true snapshot in time of that data.

 

 

[dcuellar44]

19 minutes ago, ConnerVT said:

If I may ask, what do you have in appdata that is 800GB large?  Mine is 1/10th of that (81GB) and I have 36 Docker containers installed, 27 which run 24/7/365.

I host a few websites for some photographers that sell their photos post events (sporting events). Think SmugMug. Which means there are tons of photos. All of this data I believe is in appdata for the mariaDB containers. I'd love to figure out how I can get this off of appdata and into the array rather than cache. Are you saying I can map the mariaDB containers to a different share and then have that share live on the array instead?

 

I'm not opposed to that. Just never thought of it. This whole time the appdata has been living in the array. I am just not happy about the performance (time to load pages) that I've had so far so I thought of moving appdata to the cache drives to see how that impacts it. Everything I've read has said that appdata should be in cache anyways so I figured why not since I was in the market for some new nvme cache drives. It wasn't until recently that I saw that it's 805GB worth of data and when digging into it realized its the websites.

 

Actually, is there a way to use the console to tell me the size of each of my folders in appdata? Going through shares and using calculate seems to take a very long time.

Edited August 4 by dcuellar44

[ConnerVT]

I'm not much of a database guy.  Probably a good place to start looking for answers would be in the support thread for the docker container you are using.  On the Docker tab, click the docker's icon and the Support.

 

[dcuellar44]

Ok. Before I do that I want to make sure it is the mariaDBs with all the data. I'm trying to calculate the folder sizes in Shares but it is taking forever. Is there a better way to get the folder size that you know of? A console command or something?

[ConnerVT]

I've always found QDirStat to be one of my best go-to utilities.

It's available in CA.

 

[dcuellar44]

Ok. Since I have mover going I have docker disabled but I will install it after. 

 

I did however start looking at folders individually and it's actually the Wordpress docker, not the database docker that has an extreme amount of data. Here is an example of one of the sites.

 

I'll head over to their support forum but since we were talking about it I thought I'd share in case you were curious.

 

There is a specific folder within that folder that has the majority of the data. "Gallery"... go figure. I'm curious. Any way to choose a specific folder to go to the array and the rest to cache. My goal is to make the site as fast as possible and I would think I need to have the Wordpress container on cache to help with that effort.

Edited August 5 by dcuellar44