How does finch handle cleaning up Lima diffdisk?

[bestickley]

Hi, I use Rancher Desktop but have recently been annoyed by having to factory reset it due to ~/Library/Application\ Support/rancher-desktop/lima/0/diffdisk growing above 99GB. See these related issues:

• .local/share/rancher-desktop/lima/0/diffdisk file takes up 13.5GB rancher-sandbox/rancher-desktop#2285
• Document how to cleanup images to free disk space rancher-sandbox/rancher-desktop#2398

Does finch automatically handle this for me?

[pendo324]

Hey, thanks for the reach out and sorry for the delay.

The way Finch works right now is that when you reset your VM (finch vm stop && finch vm remove && finch vm init), your "container data" will be persisted in the new VM. This means that you can safely discard your VM while still maintaining your container data.

However, the size of that container data disk is sparsely allocated and we currently do not clean or re-sparsify it automatically.

We have some issues tracking improvements to our disk size situation:

• Make the size of the persistent disk configurable #275
• 50GB carved out disk file is surprising as a Docker Desktop user #826

[bestickley]

@pendo324, no worries. Thank you. If a dev builds a lot of containers (~100/day) in their dev workflow. How large would "container data" grow? My issue with RD right now is that once the diffdisk (container data + other data I think) grows to 100GB (takes me a couple weeks) I get "no space left on disk" errors and then have to factory reset RD. Would like to avoid having to do that.