Filebeat keeps open file handlers of deleted files for a long time
editFilebeat keeps open file handlers of deleted files for a long time
editIn the default behaviour, Filebeat opens the files and keeps them open until it reaches the end of them. In situations when the configured output is blocked (e.g. Elasticsearch or Logstash is unavailable) for a long time, this can cause Filebeat to keep file handlers to files that were deleted from the file system in the mean time. As long as Filebeat keeps the deleted files open, the operating system doesn’t free up the space on disk, which can lead to increase disk utilisation or even out of disk situations.
To mitigate this issue, you can set the
close_timeout
setting to 5m
. This will ensure
every file handler is closed once every 5 minutes, regardless of whether it
reached EOF or not. Note that this option can lead to data loss if the file is
deleted before Filebeat reaches the end of the file.