How to safely and correctly disable the Access Scanner in Couchbase 7+

Couchbase Server
1

Hi all,
We’re running Couchbase Server 7.x in a production environment and are evaluating the best way to disable the Access Scanner on certain buckets.

We’ve come across a few methods in the community and documentation:

  • Rest API
    POST /pools/default/buckets/<bucket_name> -d 'accessScannerEnabled=false'

  • cbepctl flush param
    cbepctl -u admin -p pass -a host set flush_param access_scanner_enabled false

  • internal /diag/eval method

  • etc..

We want to:
• Confirm the officially supported and recommended method for Couchbase 7.x
• Understand if this change requires a node restart or is applied dynamically
• Know whether there are any side effects whilst running on live cluster
• Learn if there’s a safe way to apply this across multiple buckets or nodes or full cluster level

Would appreciate best practice guidance from Couchbase engineers or others who’ve done this in production.

Thanks!

2

There is some information in https://review.couchbase.org/c/ep-engine/+/40884

3

Thank you for your quick response @mreiche - Really appreciate it!

I’ve checked this out - using cbepctl -u admin -p pass -a host set flush_param access_scanner_enabled false applies the change immediately and doesn’t require a restart - which is good for runtime tuning.

That said, since cbepctl modifies ep-engine runtime parameters, those settings are not persisted and will revert to defaults after a node restart.

We’re specifically looking for a persistent and supported way to disable the Access Scanner - bucket level or cluster level - so the configuration survives restarts across all nodes.

Is there a way to make this setting stick across reboots ?