From 457103b90bba42d4eaf508031044548c3ba95723 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Ludovic Courtès Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2017 15:18:06 +0200 Subject: doc: Discuss when to run a GC. * doc/guix.texi (Invoking guix gc): Add a paragraph on when to run a GC. --- doc/guix.texi | 16 ++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 16 insertions(+) (limited to 'doc') diff --git a/doc/guix.texi b/doc/guix.texi index ecf9617725..dbdd9b5ff5 100644 --- a/doc/guix.texi +++ b/doc/guix.texi @@ -2315,6 +2315,22 @@ package builds referenced by those generations can be reclaimed. This is achieved by running @code{guix package --delete-generations} (@pxref{Invoking guix package}). +Our recommendation is to run a garbage collection periodically, or when +you are short on disk space. For instance, to guarantee that at least +5@tie{}GB are available on your disk, simply run: + +@example +guix gc -F 5G +@end example + +It is perfectly safe to run as a non-interactive periodic job +(@pxref{Scheduled Job Execution}, for how to set up such a job on +GuixSD). Running @command{guix gc} with no arguments will collect as +much garbage as it can, but that is often inconvenient: you may find +yourself having to rebuild or re-download software that is ``dead'' from +the GC viewpoint but that is necessary to build other pieces of +software---e.g., the compiler tool chain. + The @command{guix gc} command has three modes of operation: it can be used to garbage-collect any dead files (the default), to delete specific files (the @code{--delete} option), to print garbage-collector -- cgit v1.2.3