[p4] Managing diskspace usage of Perforce Proxy

[Frank Compagner]

Hi,

we've got a problem with diskspace usage of our proxy servers, and
I'd like to know if anybody else has had to deal with this before, and
if so, what they did about it. Let me first explain the problem:

We have a central Perforce server, serving some 150 users and about
20 build machines. Depot size is about 2TB. To increase performance
and server stability, we recently deployed 4 Perforce Proxy's throughout
the building, 3 serving some 50 users and the final one for the
buildmachines. This has worked well, performance and stability have
increased noticeably.

However, the proxy servers have a disk capacity of about 200GB,
which fills up in about a week. Sofar our admins are manually
deleting the entire contents of the proxy server at the end of each
week, after which they start to fill up again. This is too messy and
high maintenance, and I'm looking for a better alternative. Here's
some possible solutions I've come up with:

- As the bulk of the data is in large binary compressed files, where
most people only want the head revision, I could run a script that
will walk through the proxy cache every night, and from every ,d
directory delete all files but the most recent one.

- Not all branches/projects are equal; some are very heavily used by
many people, others are only used by a few. I could make a shortlist
of "privileged" parts of the depot, and if diskspace becomes low, zap
everything in the proxy cache that comes from outside those parts.

- If, after doing the above, diskspace is still low, go through the
entire proxy cache and randomly delete (say) 50% of the files.

It won't be hard to put all of this in a python script and run it
every night, but it all feels rather ad-hoc, so I was wondering if
anybody had some better ideas.

Let me know what you think,
Frank.
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Frank Compagner                                  Guerrilla Games