Server quota eaten up by aborted transfers

Nextcloud version (eg, 20.0.5): 20.0.9
Operating system and version (eg, Ubuntu 20.04): Debian 10
Apache or nginx version (eg, Apache 2.4.25): 2.4.38
PHP version (eg, 7.4): 7.3

The issue you are facing:

On a NC installation, usual size about 70gb, server with plenty of space (but a 250gb quota for this specific user), bandwith and power :slight_smile:

User is trying to upload a 15gb file (! some kind of geo 3D rendering) by copying the file into his local desktop nextcloud folder … upload fails 2 or 3 times …
Facing some kind of emergency (he must go to a meeting) user makes a manual copy (with a USB stick) into his local laptop nextcloud folder.

I guess now he is in a situation where both the Desktop and Laptop are trying to upload the file… still with no succes.

About 2 days later, the user reaches his server quota (240gb), file is still not uploaded, nextcloud is completely blocked … questions:

  • I do not recall seeing a file size limit for uploading, maybe I’m wrong ?
  • when I say “blocked”, in fact it’s kind of weird, config.php file is empty and Nextcloud is asking for reinstall ! is this normal behaviour ? (nobody touched the config.php, I was on the road when it happened according to the last mod time and user does not have that access).
  • I easily got out that situation by restoring a backed up config.php and raising the server quota to 350gb but now, the user still shows its usual usage (70gb) but the server says quota used is still at 240gb so I guess that aborted transfers did leave some kind of temp files but I cannot find them … I explored “tmp” and “cache” folders but I cannot find them, where should I look for these ? is there an occ command to kind of purge aborted transfers ? Of course I instructed user to suppress the big file from both nextcloud folders and waited 12 hours for NC to show a clean sync (green icon).

Thanks !
Pierre

1 Like

Hello,

I found an answer for third point: aborted files are staying within their destination folder with a .part extension but are not visible from the sync tool and/or the web interface.

For the first point documention is not very clear for me: here Uploading big files > 512MB — Nextcloud latest Administration Manual latest documentation it says that NC is uploading in chunks of 5mb (default) so system limits shouldn’t apply, but nonetheless they do modify PHP limits within .user.ini to 16G (in hteir example) so I’m not sure finally what is the right thing to do. What I did see before erasing all these .part files is (at least 20 of them) is that all of them were about 4,65gb which seems to tell me there is a limit somewhere …

I now instructed the user to try an upload through the browser to see …

Pierre

Hello,

Well no success so far, transfer is always failing around 4,6gb, I’m still wondering if there is some kind of limit. Using a browser or the NC client …

PC

Hi, I have a very similar situation. A user is trying to upload files - uploads folder is full of file fragments. But these are not counted as part of the user’s quota. So, not upload restriction happens. This messes up the quota of the server itself.
Nextcloud 21.0.1

My first question would be, are the cron jobs running properly. On the admin page, it should show somewhere when it ran for the last time. This should trigger a few clean-up routines and if it is not running, it could explain your problem.

thank you, indeed, cron has not run during these upload attempts