What is '/run/user/1000/libpod/tmp/exits' and how to clean it up?

[djarbz]

/run/user/1000 is a space limited tmpfs and I recently found that it filled up due to the files in /run/user/1000/libpod/tmp/exits that seem to only contain an exit code. I have almost 200k of these files.

Is there a best practice for cleaning these files up?

[Luap99]

How many containers do you run on this host (or restart the container very often)?
Podman should remove this file when the container is stopped, see

podman/libpod/container_internal.go

Lines 752 to 759 in 78f1ebb

	// Remove the exit file so we don't leak memory in tmpfs
	exitFile, err := c.exitFilePath()
	if err != nil {
	return err
	}
	if err := os.Remove(exitFile); err != nil && !os.IsNotExist(err) {
	return fmt.Errorf("removing container %s exit file: %w", c.ID(), err)
	}

If the file is leaking it sounds like you are hitting some error before the file is removed.

Also what version are you using, I suggest you try with the latest podman if you are not using it already.

[djarbz]

I have about 30 containers on this host.

Client:       Podman Engine
Version:      4.3.1
API Version:  4.3.1
Go Version:   go1.19.4
Built:        Wed Dec 31 18:00:00 1969
OS/Arch:      linux/amd64

PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)"
NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="11"
VERSION="11 (bullseye)"
VERSION_CODENAME=bullseye
ID=debian