Perforce depot clones deleted from gitserver without any indication of why

[mike-r-mclaughlin]

• Sourcegraph version: 5.1.7
• Reported by: https://github.com/sourcegraph/accounts/issues/6938

Overview

On several instances over the past couple of weeks, the Git repository mirror of a Perforce depot has mysteriously been deleted from disk and started re-cloning. For smaller git repos, this is not an issue because the repo can re-clone quickly. However, for Perforce depots, this re-clone can take hours.

Suggestions for improvement:

• Clearly indicate to the admin why the repository was/is deleted and is being re-cloned
• Only delete a repo on disk if absolutely necessary

/cc @sourcegraph/source

[eseliger]

We should see improvements in 5.3 wrt. corruption detection that might delete repositories. In addition, a purge worker that would try to make sure ample disk space is remaining that didn't actually fix the issue in the long-run because we would reclone has been disabled for customer instances, preventing "ghost deletes".

These two things together are the only sources that I could see which might cause this behavior, so unless the customer is still seeing this issue after upgrading to 5.3, I will consider this not a problem anymore.