Error Message

There is no specific error message associated with this problem, but an administrator who performs a large-scale expiry may be expecting to see a substantial reduction in the amount of disk space used by his indexes. Since the disk space occupied by the deleted items is maintained by the engine as whitespace, the administrator will not see any significant amount of disk space freed up for reuse in the operating system.

This is the expected behavior of the EV indexing engine.

If it is important to regain the disk space that was occupied by deleted items' index data, an administrator can rebuild the affected index volume(s).  A rebuild creates a new copy of the index volume from scratch and then removes the old volume. Since the new volume is built using only the items that remain in the archive, it will not contain any whitespace, and the removal of the old volume will return the unused disk space to the operating system.

Special case: If all items in an index volume are deleted, then the volume itself will be deleted by the indexing service, but only if the volume in question is not the archive's only index volume. (In other words, an archive must be associated with at least one index volume, even if that volume is empty.) The deletion of an empty index volume is not instantaneous. After the indexing engine has confirmed during its normal index volume checks that the volume is empty, a dtrace of EVIndexAdminService will show the following:

(EVIndexAdminService) [2564] <3520> {STORAGEPENDINGWORKDISCOVERY.EN_US} Verifying 1 empty volumes if ready for deletion
(EVIndexAdminService) [2564] <3520> {STORAGEPENDINGWORKDISCOVERY.EN_US} 1 empty index volumes out of 1 will be processed for deletion during this check.
(EVIndexAdminService) [2564] <3520> {STORAGEPENDINGWORKDISCOVERY.EN_US} Verifying empty volume 6 against VaultStore database EVVSExpressVaultStore_1
(EVIndexAdminService) [2564] <3520> {STORAGEPENDINGWORKDISCOVERY.EN_US} Deleting empty volume 6

It is important to note that even if a full volume is deleted, files such as transaction logs and other system files may remain.  Hence it will be common not to reclaim 100% of the space used by the index volume, and the amount of space reclaimed will vary.