Purging Asset Versions in BCC using ATG dynamo PurgingService

Recently faced couple of issues with running the Purge Service under BCC and had to do some tuning to finally make it work on large volume of versioned assets.

It is generally a good idea to periodically purge versioned repository data of old projects and asset versions. Over the period of  time, the versioning system in Content Administration (CA) can accumulate a large number of asset versions and completed projects. As asset versions accumulate, they can strain storage capacity and system performance. It also becomes hard to take live data copy and replicate to other environments.

The length of a purge depends on the number of repository and file assets that need to be purged. A purge that has  large number assets can be lengthy specially for the first time. Try scheduling multiple purges in this case.

Its also a good idea to take back up of all affected datastores and file systems before you start a purge.

Purge Service generates a Summary Metrics report before starting the purge activity and another one after the purge is completed.

The report basically has details like number of projects and asset versions removed, and the number of projects and asset versions that remain. It has a good amount of details as what is going to be purged and what will remain after that.

You might like to do few changes in your BCC server instance to run the purge service as its likely that purge will fail initially due to various reasons. Worth trying these -

(1) Purge operation executes in a transaction. If a purge has a large number of assets, you might need to raise your application server’s transaction timeout setting—for JBoss reset TransactionTimeout attribute        (in /server/yourserver/conf/jboss-service.xml file).

(2) JVM memory setting in Jboss - It depends on volume of data you have. If you get any memory error while performing Purge activity then consider increasing memory by 1 GB and keep increasing till the time memory error goes off. In ideal condition going upto 6 GB would be good enough. (-Xms6144m -Xmx6144m) under Jboss/bin/run.bat on Windows.

(3) Resolving repository data conflict - Purge service might failed on ContentRepository data, to fix this try setting VersionManagerService.enableProtectivePurge as false and then run the purge service.

For more details read Oracle ATG CA docs here –