NoMachine logfiles taking up disk space

[trapperkeeper]

I have the NoMachine service running on my personal desktop PC and it’s taking up hundreds of gigabytes of disk space. Is there any way to either prevent this from happening or to automatically clear them?

The folders taking up massive amounts of disk space are:

• %userprofile%\.nx
• %programdata%/NoMachine/var/log

I’ve manually deleted a bunch of the M-* and R* from the .nx folder and the largest folders in the log/nodes directory but was wondering if there’s a way to just let it not use up this much space?

[Britgirl]

Check that you have not configured NoMachine to keep logs in both the Player and Server settings to start off with (Settings > Player > Security and Settings > Server > Security. Generally, you enable logs when you need to reproduce a problem and then analyse the logs, but you should disable them afterwards.

A large number of M-* and R* could be an indication of something crashing and it would be a good idea to send us an example of what you have, so we can check them. You’ve deleted them now, but if they continue to grow, please submit some examples.

 

[trapperkeeper]

Thanks for the reply. I am not seeing any options for logs within Security on either Player or Server. The only related option I can see on the player side is “Don’t delete log files on exit” which is unchecked.

Server > Status has an option for Server logs, which had been set to 6 – Standard. I changed that to 3 – Error.

For the M-* and R-* within the .nx folder, my issue wasn’t so much that there were a lot of folders there, but that a few of them had ballooned in size. The largest folder was taking up ~240GB of disk space and a number of other folders were in the ~30GB range.

[Britgirl]

So the logs are not enabled. Just to clarify, the security section of the Player has an option to enable/disable logs using the checkbox. The Server logs are gathered this way, apologies for that.

https://kb.nomachine.com/DT07S00236#2.4
https://kb.nomachine.com/DT07S00236#3.1

So all those entries you are noticing are being triggered by some other event. ~240GB of disk space and folders occuping ~30GB should not be happening. As I said, please submit some samples if it starts happening again.

[trapperkeeper]

I finally experienced this again. What kind of samples did you need?

Here are some screenshots from WizTree when I tried to figure out where all my disk space went:

[Britgirl]

Can you send us the first and last 1000 lines of the big files?

On Windows you can use Powershell e.g

Get-Content -Path <path to big file> -TotalCount 1000 | Set-Content -Path head.txt

Get-Content -Path <path to big file> -Tail 1000 | Set-Content -Path tail.txt

but you may have your own graphical tools to do that. Send everthing to forum[at]nomachine[dot]com. Thanks.

[Britgirl]

The -head and -tail extracts were useful. What we see is that all the networking resources (such as socket handles) get an error at the same time. Can you check whether there are any antivirus, anti-malware, security system that may be interfering? When the problem occurs, the NoMachine Player process remains in the background instead of closing (so it continues to log, hence the big logs, both nx session and the log node session logs show the same thing by the way and we’ll see what improvements can be made to mitigate this). It should be easy to understand whether disabling the “security system” or adding NoMachine Player among the exceptions helps.

[trapperkeeper]

Thanks for getting back to me.

For the check of antivirus/antimalware/security, do I do that check on the host or the client or both? I’m only using Windows Defender on my host Windows desktop, so I’ll add NoMachine to one of the exceptions. The client is usually a Macbook Pro that has no antivirus installed.

The usual way I use NoMachine is to access my home Windows PC from work by using Tailscale to create a tunnel with my work Macbook so that I can access my desktop on the “same LAN.” I wonder if Tailscale is causing that networking error somehow.

[Britgirl]

It might be. As I mentioned earlier, the issue is triggered by a strange case where all sockets get into an error state at the same time. This is for sure something occurring at the system level and not dependent on NoMachine. We don’t know the specific reason, but the point is that NoMachine doesn’t fail cleanly in this particular case and an infinite loop starts, spamming the log. We detected the problem and a fix will be available in the next release. If you want, we can send a patched library.

[Britgirl]

Here is the link to the Trouble Report which you can monitor to know when the fix has been released.

https://kb.nomachine.com/TR11V11243

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