remember to get rid of old boot environments to free up space

[NapoleonWils0n]

my old macbook air 2011 was running really slowly on Freebsd 14.2-p2
compared to 14.1

and i couldnt figure out what was causing the issue

emacs was taking over 10 seconds to start
when normally its starts in 1 or 2 seconds

when i tried to do a pkg update it said there was no space left

so i used df to display the free disk space

df -h

and discovered that the file system was as 100%

which was really odd as i only have some git repos
and old family photos on the machine

i figured maybe the issue was old boot environments
so i listed the boot environments with beadm

beadm list

the current environments is 14.2-p2

so i destroyed the old boot environments, like this

doas beadm destroy -F 14.2

that reclaimed lots of disk space
problem solved

pkg update and upgrade worked after that
and emacs opens in 1 second instead of 10 seconds

 

[T-Aoki]

It's applicable not only BEs, but also non-BE snapshots.
This is because BEs uses snapshot, and snapshot holds old state (metadata and diffs to allow rolling back and mounting snapshots). Not sure UFS snapshots keeps metadata only or include data diffs.

 

[NapoleonWils0n]

i did get rid of old zfs snapshots
but i forgot about the BEs

easily done

 

[T-Aoki]

i did get rid of old zfs snapshots
but i forgot about the BEs

easily done

Ah, I've experienced the situation before, too.