Retention

Strøm can automatically clean up old data — inactive workers, completed jobs, and their log files. Retention is configured via the retention section in server-config.yaml and is disabled by default.

Configuration

retention:
  worker_hours: 2          # Delete inactive workers older than 2h (optional)
  job_days: 30             # Delete terminal jobs and logs older than 30d (optional)
  interval_secs: 3600      # How often cleanup runs, in seconds (default: 3600)

Field	Type	Default	Description
worker_hours	integer	disabled	Hours after which inactive workers are deleted
job_days	integer	disabled	Days after which terminal jobs and their logs are deleted
interval_secs	integer	3600	How often the cleanup runs (rate-limited independently of the recovery sweep)

Worker retention (worker_hours)

Deletes workers with status = 'inactive' whose last heartbeat is older than the configured threshold. Active workers are never deleted. Workers that come back online are automatically reactivated on their next heartbeat — retention only removes workers that are truly gone.

Job retention (job_days)

For each terminal job (completed, failed, cancelled, or skipped) older than the configured threshold:

1. Deletes local log files (.jsonl and legacy .log)
2. Deletes the archive log (S3 or local archive, if configured)
3. Deletes the job and its steps from the database (steps are cascade-deleted via FK constraint)

Pending and running jobs are never affected. Jobs are processed in batches of 1000 per cleanup cycle.

How it works

Retention cleanup runs as a phase of the recovery sweeper background task, but is rate-limited independently via interval_secs (default: once per hour) so that frequent recovery sweeps don’t trigger expensive deletion scans on every cycle.