Dealing with the ridiculous amount of PostgreSQL space used by N8N.

N8N's database capacity was great.

I usually use n8n to connect and automate various tasks.
previously written article

The other day I upgraded to a major version, so I looked at the data capacity before updating, and it was a surprise '64GByte' ...

It's just too big.
Because it had become a capacity that I did not even feel like backing up, I investigated how to make the data smaller.

Configuration of N8N log data deletion from oldest to newest.

Since it is PostgreSQL, I thought I could just 'VACUUM' it, but it seems there was some setting in the configuration that would delete the old data. A similar question was raised on this forum.

Hard disk full - where to delete logs?

Hi - great app, thank you all! My hard drive is full and I can no longer save my workflow. I’m assuming it’s the buildup of n8n logs, since everything was working well for a while. Can you please point me to where the logs are saved, so I can delete some? If it matters, I installed using npm, not docker. Thank you so much!

n8n

It seems that by setting the following environment variable, the old logs are deleted at startup.

1# Activates automatic data pruning
2export EXECUTIONS_DATA_PRUNE=true
3# Number of hours after execution when they should be deleted, by default 14 days
4export EXECUTIONS_DATA_MAX_AGE=336

The default for "EXECUTIONS_DATA_MAX_AGE" is 14 days, but "EXECUTIONS_DATA_PRUNE" is not true by default...
I would have been happy if it was true by default.

VACUUM is required for SQLite

If you are using SQLite, it seems that you cannot delete data by setting environment variables.

It seems that you will have to use the method described in this forum to perform VACUUM.

How to vacuum sqlite database?

I want to know how to vacuum sqlite database. I tried a syntax MANUAL VACUUM command for the whole database from command prompt: $sqlite3 database_name "VACUUM;"; But it's giving error as: near "

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