# How to get rid of deleted documents and reclaim disk space?

**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-get-rid-of-deleted-documents-and-reclaim-disk-space/303184
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [April 25, 2022, 4:26pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-get-rid-of-deleted-documents-and-reclaim-disk-space/303184 "2022-04-25T16:26:26Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 9

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### Author: ![rgelb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/da6949/32.png) [@rgelb](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/rgelb)
#### Post date: [April 26, 2022, 7:32pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-get-rid-of-deleted-documents-and-reclaim-disk-space/303184/9 "2022-04-26T19:32:47Z")

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@stephenb I never worked at CoreLogic, but I've worked with the company a number of times on various real estate projects. Your name does sound familiar.

The issue with space... There is about 40% of space remaining.  
 ![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/7/9/7924411b996008ec2f017049629438cf5af29f3b.png)

And for each node (last one being the master):  
 ![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/9/1/919a6bbace3452434c53da61367a286a589186c1.png)

Assuming that is the case, I should still be able to clean up deleted records from an index that only has a few. For example, index `newsarticles_web01_dev_637044237457830355` has 7833 indexed documents and 3 deleted ones.

 ![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/9/e/9e6b343e09650b45240130be60aeb5dfee5e1d78.png)

Surely, I should be able to issue a forcemerge command on this index:  
`POST newsarticles_web01_dev_637044237457830355/_forcemerge?only_expunge_deletes=true`

But it results in a timeout as well and nothing happens.

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