Fixing the DirectAdmin: User Too Large Delete on Background Error: A Complete Guide

Just like other software, DirectAdmin ships with a lot of default settings. And one of them is, when the sum of the disk usage for any user being deleted exceeds the default threshold, the account gets deleted in the background by a process.

You’ll receive these types of errors in the form of timeouts in your browser. DirectAdmin will initiate the delete process and add the command to the task.queue of background. In the process, the following error message will flash on your screen:

User too large, delete on background

The process will actually just be the dataskq

The Solution

There’s an easy fix to this. You need to change the value of the size so that DirectAdmin can allocate more space before deleting in the background.

For this, you’d have to edit the directadmin.conf settings file. Follow the steps mentioned below:

• Connect to your server using SSH connection. Make sure you have root privileges
• Use this command to navigate into DirectAdmin’s installed directory:

• Now, you can edit the configuration file using this command:

You’ll notice the “get_background_delete_size” parameter to be set to 10GB or 10240 MB by default. But in other cases, you’ll notice the parameter doesn’t even exist. In such cases, you’ll be required to add it.

Once you’ve added it, you need to set it to 20GB or 20480 bytes. This will increase the disk space usage limit.

Save everything and exit. Now you shouldn’t see that error unless the disk usage is more than 20 GB.