Pods evicted with error "The node was low on resource: ephemeral-storage"

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • OpenShift Container Platform
    • 3.11

Issue

  • Pods are being evicted and are getting an ephemeral storage error:
# oc get pods
NAME                               READY     STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
application-name-ID-5-3-mggtz     1/1       Running     0          1h
application-name-ID-5-3-pvrwt     1/1       Running     0          1h
application-name-ID-5-1-build    0/1       Completed   0          21d
application-name-ID-5-2-build    0/1       Completed   0          21d
application-name-ID-5-1-build        0/1       Completed   0          4h
application-name-ID-5-1-deploy       0/1       Error       0          4h
application-name-ID-5-5-29qsv        0/1       Evicted     0          1h
application-name-ID-5-5-2pm5x        1/1       Running     0          1h
application-name-ID-5-4mgpt        0/1       Evicted     0          1h
application-name-ID-5-6zx5k        1/1       Running     0          2h
application-name-ID-5-74fw8        1/1       Running     0          1h
application-name-ID-5-7zrd5        0/1       Evicted     0          1h
application-name-ID-5-8n9p9        0/1       Evicted     0          1h
application-name-ID-5-dm5cg        0/1       Evicted     0          1h
application-name-ID-5-dvkdc        0/1       Evicted     0          1h
application-name-ID-5-g7q5n        1/1       Running     0          1h
application-name-ID-5-grzbl        0/1       Evicted     0          1h
application-name-ID-5-hrf5f        0/1       Evicted     0          1h
application-name-ID-5-j5z4r        0/1       Evicted     0          1h
application-name-ID-5-j69ht        1/1       Running     0          1h
application-name-ID-5-jpmdr        0/1       Evicted     0          1h
application-name-ID-5-lxcsr        0/1       Evicted     0          1h

# oc describe pod application-name-ID-5-lxcsr
...
Status:             Failed
Reason:             Evicted
Message:            The node was low on resource: ephemeral-storage. Container application-name-ID-5-lxcsr was using 8369512Ki, which exceeds its request of 0.
  • Garbage Collection tuning, docker pruning, oc adm pruning, and editing the eviction thresholds have all been attempted to no avail.
  • Disk pressure errors are not present.

Resolution

  • In some cases, this is because an excess of log messages are consuming the storage. Configure the Docker logging driver to limit the amount of stored logs:
{
"log-driver": "json-file",
"log-opts": {
"max-size": "100m",
"max-file": "5"
}
}
  • In other cases, pods that use emptyDir without storage quotas will fill up this storage, where the following error is present:
eviction manager: attempting to reclaim ephemeral-storage
  • Set a quota to limit this, as otherwise any container can write any amount of storage to its node filesystem.

Root Cause

  • The pod logs, or emptyDir usage, are filling up ephemeral storage.
  • This KCS addresses the quota and /var filesystem more directly, as it's also an option to just grow the /var filesystem to fix this.

Diagnostic Steps

Check the containers running in the node:
#docker ps|cut -f1 -d ' '

Find where the data is stored:
#docker inspect <IDofContainer> --format='{{.LogPath}}'

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