What causes "Deleted only {} of {} file(s) ({})" in apache/iceberg?

Inspect per-file warnings emitted earlier for the failed paths.

Deleted only of file(s) ( )

Error message

Deleted only {} of {} file(s) ({})

What it means

After SparkCleanupUtil.deleteFiles finishes, it compares the successfully deleted count against the requested path count. If some deletions failed (each logged individually), it warns that only a portion of the files were removed. Table data integrity is unaffected — these are uncommitted/abort-time files — but storage may accumulate leftovers.

Solutions

Inspect per-file warnings emitted earlier for the failed paths.
Run remove_orphan_files later to sweep leftover files.
Fix underlying storage issues (quota, credentials, throttling) before rerunning workloads that abort frequently.

Defensive patterns

Strategy: fallback

Prevention

Schedule periodic remove_orphan_files to reclaim partially-deleted files.
Watch for recurring partial deletions — usually throttling or permission drift.
Ensure bucket quotas/limits accommodate parallel delete bursts.

When it happens

Trigger: One or more delete calls in the parallel Tasks.foreach failed (or IOException escaped io.deleteFile for some paths), so deletedFilesCount < paths.size() after retries.

Common situations: Partial object-store throttling during large abort cleanups; permission changes mid-job; expired sessions on a subset of workers.

Understand the failure class

Background: "failed to write file", "Could not save figure", "Error saving remote file" — file write failed: causes and fixes across languages and libraries — this error's family across 38 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of apache/iceberg@86d9c8fc54 (2026-09-12). Data as JSON: /api/errors/d56355cd0186a117. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at spark/v4.0/spark/src/main/java/org/apache/iceberg/spark/source/SparkCleanupUtil.java:115

    Tasks.foreach(paths)
        .executeWith(ThreadPools.getWorkerPool())
        .stopRetryOn(NotFoundException.class)
        .suppressFailureWhenFinished()
        .onFailure((path, exc) -> LOG.warn("Failed to delete {} ({})", path, context, exc))
        .retry(DELETE_NUM_RETRIES)
        .exponentialBackoff(
            DELETE_MIN_RETRY_WAIT_MS,
            DELETE_MAX_RETRY_WAIT_MS,
            DELETE_TOTAL_RETRY_TIME_MS,
            2 /* exponential */)
        .run(
            path -> {
              io.deleteFile(path);
              deletedFilesCount.incrementAndGet();
            });

    if (deletedFilesCount.get() < paths.size()) {
      LOG.warn("Deleted only {} of {} file(s) ({})", deletedFilesCount, paths.size(), context);
    } else {
      LOG.info("Deleted {} file(s) ({})", paths.size(), context);
    }
  }
}

View on GitHub (pinned to 86d9c8fc54)