Cleaning Up Experiments

Although DVC uses minimal resources to keep track of the experiments, they may clutter tables and the workspace. DVC allows to remove specific experiments from the workspace or delete the ones that are not final yet.

Removing specific experiments

When you want to discard experiments by their name, you can use dvc exp remove and supply the experiment name.

$ dvc exp list
main:
    cnn-32
    cnn-64
    cnn-128
$ dvc exp remove cnn-32 cnn-64
Removed experiments: cnn-32,cnn-64

Removing multiple experiments (based on parent commit)

You may wish to remove multiple experiments at once. For example, if you are finished experimenting on the current Git commit and want to discard all experiments derived from it, use dvc exp remove --rev with HEAD.

$ dvc exp list
refs/tags/baseline-experiment:
        cnn-128
        cnn-32
        cnn-64
        cnn-96
$ dvc exp remove --rev HEAD
Removed experiments: cnn-128,cnn-32,cnn-64,cnn-96

Cleaning up experiments

After you've completed a set of experiments, it may be easier to decide which of these to keep rather than which of these to remove. You can use dvc exp gc to select a set of experiments to keep and the rest of them are garbage collected.

This command takes a scope argument. It accepts "workspace", "all-branches", "all-tags", or "all-commits". This determines the experiments to keep, i.e. experiments not in scope are removed.

⚠️ Note that experiment remains in the cache until you use regular dvc gc separately to clean it up (if it's not needed by committed versions).

Keeping experiments in the workspace

Supplying --workspace flag to dvc exp gc causes all experiments to be removed except those in the current workspace.

$ dvc exp list --all-commits
main:
   exp-aaa000
   exp-aaa111
   exp-aaa222
other:
   exp-bbb333
   exp-bbb444
another:
   exp-ccc555
   exp-ccc666
   exp-ccc777

Issuing dvc exp gc --workspace removes experiments in other and another branches in this example.

$ dvc exp gc --workspace
$ dvc exp list --all-commits
main:
   exp-abc000
   exp-abc111
   exp-abc222

Keeping experiments in all branches

DVC can create a branch for an experiment using dvc exp branch command.

In cases where you want to clean up the experiments except those in the branches, you can use --all-branches flag.

$ dvc exp show --all-branches

 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  neutral:**Experiment**                neutral:**Created**           metric:**acc**   param:**model.conv_units**
 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  workspace                 -                   -   64
  cnn-48                    09:11 AM       0.9131   48
  main                      Jul 21, 2021   0.9189   16
  ├── dac711b [cnn-32]      09:16 AM       0.9152   32
  ├── 7cd3ae7 [cnn-48]      09:11 AM       0.9131   48
  ├── ab585b5 [cnn-24]      09:06 AM       0.9135   24
  ├── 7d51b55 [exp-44136]   09:01 AM       0.9151   16
  └── 7feaa1c [exp-78ede]   Aug 02, 2021   0.9151   16
  8583124                   Jul 20, 2021   0.9132   17
 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Supplying --all-branches keeps only the experiments in branch tips. Any experiment that's not promoted to a branch is removed this way.

$ dvc exp gc --all-branches
WARNING: This will remove all experiments except those derived from the workspace and all git branches of the current repo.
Are you sure you want to proceed? [y/n] y
Removed 6 experiments. To remove unused cache files use 'dvc gc'.

The resulting dvc exp show table is as the following:

 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  neutral:**Experiment**                neutral:**Created**           metric:**acc**   metric:**model.conv_units**
 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  workspace                 -                   -   64
  cnn-48                    09:11 AM       0.9131   48
  main                      Jul 21, 2021   0.9189   16
  8583124                   Jul 20, 2021   0.9132   17
 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Keeping experiments in all tags

When you tag the experiment commits by git tag, dvc exp show --all-tags presents them along with the tags. If you want the delete all experiments without tags, you can issue a dvc exp gc --all-tags command.

$ dvc exp show --all-tags

 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  neutral:**Experiment**                   metric:**acc**   metric:**model.conv_units**
 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  workspace                 0.9067   16
  ├── 2fc4f81 [exp-a1b3c4]  0.9037   48
  └── 21beb69 [exp-d4e3ff]  0.9367   128
  my-experiments            0.9067   16
  ├── 2fc4f81 [cnn-32]      0.9067   32
  ├── 5bc84a3 [cnn-64]      0.9158   64
  ├── 206cba6 [cnn-96]      0.9260   96
  └── 21beb69 [cnn-128]     0.9379   128
 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────

$ dvc exp gc --all-tags

$ dvc exp show --all-tags

 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  neutral:**Experiment**                   metric:**acc**   metric:**model.conv_units**
 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  workspace                 0.9067   16
  my-experiments            0.9067   16
  ├── 2fc4f81 [cnn-32]      0.9067   32
  ├── 5bc84a3 [cnn-64]      0.9158   64
  ├── 206cba6 [cnn-96]      0.9260   96
  └── 21beb69 [cnn-128]     0.9379   128
 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Keeping experiments in all commits

When you want to delete all the experiments not associated with a Git commit, you can do so by --all-commits flag. It deletes the experiments in the workspace that are not committed to the history.

Note that dvc exp gc and dvc exp remove do not delete any objects in the DVC cache. In order to remove the cache objects, e.g. model files, intermediate artifacts, etc. related with the experiments, you can use dvc gc command.

dvc gc receives the same scoping flags, --workspace, --all-branches, etc. After a dvc exp gc --workspace command, you can supply dvc gc --workspace to remove all the experiment artifacts from the cache as well.

Removing experiments from remotes

As you push the experiments with dvc exp push, Git remotes may be become cluttered with experiment references. To remove experiments from a Git remote, use dvc exp remove -g.

$ dvc exp remove -g origin exp-ab780
Removed experiments: exp-bb09c

Removing queued experiments

When you've queued experiments with dvc exp run --queue and later decide not to run them, you can remove them with dvc exp remove --queue.

$ dvc exp run --queue -S param=10
Queued experiment '7b83744' for future execution.
$ dvc exp run --queue -S param=20
Queued experiment '68808d5' for future execution.
$ dvc exp show

 ─────────────────────────────────────
  neutral:**Experiment**     neutral:**Created**        metric:**param**
 ─────────────────────────────────────
  workspace      -              -
  04abbb7        Jul 21, 2021   -
  ├── *68808d5   12:05 PM       20
  └── *7b83744   12:05 PM       10
 ─────────────────────────────────────

$ dvc exp remove --queue
$ dvc exp show

 ─────────────────────────────────────
  neutral:**Experiment**     neutral:**Created**        metric:**param**
 ─────────────────────────────────────
  workspace      -              -
  04abbb7        Jul 21, 2021   -
 ─────────────────────────────────────