Argument for removing old jobs

[VFloyd]

Morning,

Jumping straight to the point - we have jobs in our Jenkins instance that have not run in two years (successfully or unsuccessfully).  We have jobs that people set up months ago and have never run.  I have sent e-mails, made visits to peoples desks, made calls all trying to get people to take care of their jobs and I still have them out there.

I started disabling anything that hadn't run successfully in 12 months.  My boss says I am wrong for doing this.  I am also wrong for wanting to shelve or just put these job in a zip file.

I have better things to do.  Can anyone give me a for or against leaving abandoned jobs in Jenkins?

Vanetta

[Sami Tikka]

The old jobs take up disk space. The job configuration itself does not take much, but if there are any build artifacts, there might be a lot of disk space consumed by these jobs. Remember, Jenkins only deletes old build artifacts when a new build has been run. If there are no new builds => nothing gets deleted.

The more jobs Jenkins has, the slower it is. Usually this is not a big problem but if there are a lot of unnecessary jobs, your Jenkins will be slower (and takes more RAM) than it needs.

The most important argument for deleting unnecessary jobs to me, however, is clarity: If there are lots of jobs, it is more difficult to navigate and find the job you are looking for. Good naming conventions and using Jenkins views can help here but I have never had success getting people to follow naming conventions...

Also, there might be maintenance overhead involved: For example, couple of years ago my employer switched from Github Enterprise to Stash and I had to go through a lot of jobs to reconfigure them. If you had old, obsolete jobs, why would you reconfigure them? And if you didn't, they would not work if anyone tried to run them. And what is the point of keeping jobs in Jenkins that cannot be run? Jenkins is a job runner. Nothing else.

-- Sami

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[Maciej Jaros]

VFloyd (2015-07-16 16:21):

If you remove the job it is lost. That's obviously the main problem of just deleting jobs. The problem is that not only it's configuration is lost, but also it's test history and release history (unless you have a copy of it elsewhere)...

I usually follow this schema:

1. Disable job.
2. If after some time (week, month) nobody cared, then I move the folder from `jenkins-data/jobs` to `jenkins-data-old/jobs`. That way it is no longer visible in Jenkins. It's no longer in jenkins-data backups either.
3. If we start running low on space I remove jobs from `jenkins-data-old`.

At a very least I would just keep a backup of `config.xml` of all jobs. We have them in SVN so that I don't have to worry too much about deleting things.

Regards,
Nux.