Deleting unneeded snapshots from a Workflow Center server manually

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This topic only applies to BAW, and is located in the BAW repository. Last updated on 2025-01-20 10:38
Every time that a Process Designer user saves work, an unnamed snapshot is created. Hundreds of unnamed snapshots quickly accumulate. Over time, you can also accumulate snapshots that were once active but are no longer used. Deleting the snapshots that are not used or needed is good practice for several reasons.

Before you begin

The easy way to manage the accumulation of unnamed snapshots on your Workflow Center server is to enable automatic deletion of snapshots. However, you can also delete specific unnamed snapshots or archived snapshots by following the steps that follow.

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About this task

You might want to delete unneeded snapshots to reduce the size of the Workflow Center database. If you have many projects in development in your Workflow Center, you are likely to find that the Workflow Center database is growing rapidly. One action that you can take is to remove unnamed snapshots. Unnamed snapshots exist between named snapshots. Reduce database bloat by removing the unnamed snapshots. You can also delete archived snapshots for the same purpose.

You might also want to delete unnamed snapshots if your Workflow Center server performance is slowly degrading. Having hundreds or thousands of unnamed snapshots on the server could contribute to worsening performance. Delete snapshots that are not used or needed.

Use the wsadmin command BPMSnapshotCleanup to delete unnamed and archived snapshots for a process. The BPMSnapshotCleanup command deletes all instances of the snapshot, including task instances and process instances, no matter what state they are in. See the command reference topic for a complete list of parameters for this command.

In many situations, it is a good idea to purge unneeded snapshots on a regular schedule. To avoid performance degradation or timeouts in Process Designer run the BPMSnapshotCleanup command when no operations are running on the Workflow Center and no connections are open between the Process Designer and the Workflow Center.

Procedure

  1. Run the wsadmin BPMListProcessApplication command on the Workflow Center server to show all process application snapshots on that server.
  2. Archive named snapshots if they are no longer needed and you want to delete them.
    You can delete named snapshots from the Workflow Center server only if they are archived. Run BPMShowSnapshot to see information about a specific snapshot.
  3. Run the wsadmin BPMShowProcessApplication command to show details about the process application, including the process application acronym.
    You need the acronym to run the BPMSnapshotCleanup command.
  4. Set the containerAcronym parameter to identify the process application that contains the snapshots to be deleted.
  5. Set optional parameters.
    You must set at least one optional parameter as a filter for determining which unnamed snapshots are deleted. You can also use one of the optional parameters, deleteArchivedSnapshot, to delete archived snapshots in addition to unnamed snapshots. See the BPMSnapshotCleanup command reference for a complete list of parameters for that command.
  6. Run the BPMSnapshotCleanup command to delete all unnamed snapshots that fit within the parameters that you have defined.
    To delete the first snapshot of a process application, you must use the -force option. The first snapshot is needed because it contains the information that shows in the Revision History window in Process Designer.
    Tip: If you are using a SOAP connection, the command can take longer to complete than the specified SOAP timeout value. Although the command continues to run until it is finished, you might see the exception java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Read timed out. To prevent this exception, set a higher value for the com.ibm.SOAP.requestTimeout property in the profile_root/properties/soap.client.props file.