While running your garbage collector it may suddenly stop working and you will encounter the following error, in your artifactory-service.log:
The task lock-key (binary-store-garbage-collector) is already locked.
The error message normally occurs when an Artifactory Garbage Collection job was triggered but could not be completed. It leads to GC being locked and you will be unable to trigger and run future GC jobs.
This error can be resolved by performing a rolling reboot of each Artifactory node in an HA cluster, then running the GC job to completion manually. The GC "Run Now" button can be found under Admin -> Artifactory -> Advanced -> Maintenance:
Note: There may be an error that caused the previous GC run to fail. Double check the logs while running the manual GC job to make sure it completes successfully.