Keep Environment Clean

As far as I know, old process model versions get automatically archived. From Appian 7.8 or 7.9, old process model versions are automatically archived to the disk.
I do not know about the cleanup of old versions of rules.

I don't think old rules would be taking any memory up.

Since this is only DEV as well, there is nothing stopping you selecting all the processes and deleting them, but it's preferred if you set your data management archiving schedule appropriately and you shouldn't run into any issues with memory. If problems persist, talk with Appian Support and you may need to increase the amount of RAM for your Appian instances.

Process model versions are automatically cleaned up from the EXEC engines when no processes are using that version. What this user is describing is high memory usage on the DESIGN engines. The cleanup described does not apply to DESIGN. Versions in DESIGN can only be cleaned up on-demand via plug-in.

What can increase the memory usage in the COLLABORATION engine is the number of versions of a constant, more than rules. And this is common if you're updating the value of a constant very frequently and creating versions of it. If you are not, then I doubt this can be the problem. You can work with Appian Solution Engineering (formerly Support) to find out more.

Thank you Eduardo for the clarification. To conclude - it is good to have a utility process model which will cleanup the old process model versions(say versions which are older than latest 5 versions). This will clean it up from the DESIGN engine. I misunderstood what I had read at: forum.appian.com/.../Appian_Release_Notes.html

As long as you are not using those versions in processes then yes. So basically for NON-PROD this would be a good idea.

Hi Eduardo,
I was under the same impression regarding as @chetany regarding the auto-cleanup that Appian did.
Do you know if this is going to be addressed in upcoming versions of Appian? Or should we all be creating a clean-up utility to delete old, unused versions of process models?

No, the auto-cleanup is on EXEC. The product cannot assume that developers don't want a version on DESIGN anymore just because there are no running instances using that version, especially because developers might want to go back and check previous versions designs.

This can be done only with EXEC because if you were to need an older version to run a new instance, you could still do it because the version is on DESIGN.

Also, something important to point out, based on my experience, is that cleaning up the versions doesn't reduce the memory utilization that much.

I have submitted a use case for the product to report what is using that amount of memory in the DESIGN engine to take the necessary corrective actions.

Eduardo Fuentess
Appian Solution Engineering.

Thanks for the detailed explanation Eduardo.
Your submitted use case sounds like it would be a useful addition, although I do wonder if the DESIGN engine could retrieve older versions of process models from another source (e.g. disk).

I'll let the Engineering Team decide how to implement this future solution. At the moment what I can tell is that if you use the plug-in to do the clean-up the versions both from DESIGN and disk are deleted.

Actually, some historical background, the main purpose of the cleanup plug-in was to limit the number of files on disk created by old versions.

Ok, thanks Eduardo.