Operations hang after starting system prune

[acdha]

I ran docker system prune to clear out old dev images. That appears to have hung with no feedback: commands like docker ps hang and there's no UI indicating what might be the problem. There were periods where Hyperkit was 140% CPU but the running average is close to idle and disk I/O has fluctuated between modest (tens of operations per second) to idle.

It's possible that everything is working correctly but it'd be nice to know whether that's the case and whether I should just leave it running (after about 10 minutes) or if restarting it will be required.

Information

• 82040D1C-9491-46F7-A12E-B917B287132F

Docker for Mac: version: 17.12.0-ce-mac49 (d1778b704353fa5b79142a2055a2c11c8b48a653)
macOS: version 10.13.3 (build: 17D47)
logs: /tmp/82040D1C-9491-46F7-A12E-B917B287132F/20180124-132812.tar.gz
failure: docker ps failed: (Failure "docker ps: timeout after 10.00s")
[OK]     db.git
[OK]     vmnetd
[OK]     dns
[OK]     driver.amd64-linux
[OK]     virtualization VT-X
[OK]     app
[OK]     moby
[OK]     system
[OK]     moby-syslog
[OK]     kubernetes
[OK]     env
[OK]     virtualization kern.hv_support
[OK]     slirp
[OK]     osxfs
[OK]     moby-console
[OK]     logs
[ERROR]  docker-cli
         docker ps failed
[OK]     menubar
[OK]     disk

Steps to reproduce the behavior

1. docker system prune
2. docker ps

[acdha]

I tried to do a factory reset but that also hung. Killing the Docker process caused it to restart with what appears to be a clean install. Again, no UI feedback on what the last step was – the progress bar was over on the 100% side but it stayed there without feedback for at least 10 minutes.

[noahd1]

I also experienced this behavior. Attempting to use Diagnose & Feedback while docker system prune was running hung as well. Eventually, docker system prune returned at which point the diagnose and feedback results (below) were immediately output.

(Note this was my second attempt at docker system prune -- the first one I gave up on and ended up having to restart Docker)

Docker for Mac: version: 17.12.0-ce-mac55 (18467c0ae7afb7a736e304f991ccc1a61d67a4ab)
macOS: version 10.13.3 (build: 17D102)
logs: /tmp/F4061EC1-D38E-44DE-8F3E-50BE0111AF00/20180309-103211.tar.gz
[OK]     vpnkit
[OK]     vmnetd
[OK]     dns
[OK]     driver.amd64-linux
[OK]     app
[OK]     virtualization VT-X
[OK]     moby
[OK]     system
[OK]     moby-syslog
[OK]     kubernetes
[OK]     env
[OK]     virtualization kern.hv_support
[OK]     moby-console
[OK]     osxfs
[OK]     logs
[OK]     docker-cli
[OK]     disk

[calebtote]

Fyi, mine looked like it was hanging for a while -- I googled around for answers, found this, waited some more, and it finally completed about 20-30 minutes after I initiated the command.

[YRM64]

A lot of the material I've read indicates one must be very careful using Docker prune. In order to remove unused images "The client and daemon API must both be at least 1.25 to use this command." And, there are Docker prune options that might be a better option to Docker prune, i.e., --all , -a (for removing all unused images, not just dangling ones. This is significant because by default, Docker image prune cleans up dangling images only.

[kamil-kielczewski]

MacOS HighSierra (Docker version 18.03.1-ce, build 9ee9f40):

1. I run docker images and see 37 images with repository and 52 with <none> repository (so called "dingling" or something...) - total 89 images, average image size: 500 MB

2. To clean this mess up I run docker system prune -a after 2h of working (without any console message written by docker), I saw that Hyperkit read 9GB and write 8GB, CPU=99% allmost all time.

3. After this 2 hours (all time I was unable to run docker ps or docker images) I decide to push ctrl+z but ps and images still doesn't work - so after that I restart docker (by its icon menu at the MacOs top bar).

4. Then I write docker images and I saw that 90% of my images was deleted (what was great, but why so long ! :/ ) last 9 images i delete by docker rmi xxxxx

My proposition: lets make docker system prune write some feedback like % or something during execution... .

Currently I think it is good idea to break docker system prune... (and reset) after each hour and check status using docker images

[jleppert]

Isn't it great when you're stuck waiting at the command line, wondering if this thing has become broken again? Struggling to understand how traversing a tree and deleting some files could be taking so long... Then you check your running processes and wonder to yourself...if the lost soul who wrote this thing couldn't be bothered to output some status text to the user, did he correctly implement signals to clean up and not leave itself in an inconsistent state on restart? The world will never know.

This is awful. I've wasted half a day waiting for it to complete. I eventually cancelled it so hopefully docker will clean up ok.

[mwcm]

ran into this today too, system prune and image prune both resulted in the same behavior

[briancaffey]

If you have lots of untagged images, run the following command:

docker rmi $(docker images -f "dangling=true"-q)

There could potentially be lots of these images, and when you run:

docker system prune

It doesn't show the images as they are being untagged and deleted, so it seems like the docker command is hanging.

From this docker forum post

[nickgrealy]

Just an update to @briancaffey's solution...

Sounds silly, but for me things "seemed" to work better, by copying and pasting a list of docker rmi commands into my console.

I used this to generate the list:

docker images -f "dangling=true" -q | xargs -I {} echo docker rmi -f {}

(I got visual feedback on progress, I could see which image was holding things up, etc etc)

[docker-robott]

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[kamil-kielczewski]

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