Remove inactive users from hub ORM

JupyterHub performance sometimes scales with the total number of users in its ORM database, rather than the number of running users. Reducing the user count enables the hub to restart much faster. While this issue should be addressed, we can work around it by deleting inactive users from the hub database once in a while. Note that this does not delete the user’s storage.

The script scripts/delete-unused-users.py will delete anyone who hasn’t registered any activity in a given period of time, double checking to make sure they aren’t active right now. This will require users to log in again the next time they use the hub, but that is probably fine.

This should be done before the start of each semester, particularly on hubs with a lot of users.

Run the script

You can run the script on your own device. The script depends on the jhub_client python library. This can be installed with pip install jhub_client.

1. You will need to acquire a JupyterHub API token with administrative rights. A hub admin can go to {hub_url}/hub/token to create a new one.

2. Set the environment variable JUPYTERHUB_API_TOKEN to the token.

3. Run python scripts/delete-unused-users.py –hub_url {hub_url}