Emptying recycle bin doesn't make more free space available

Question

I've copied a 10 GB site to a site collection in another content database. Then I deleted the site and emptied the recycle bin of the former site collection.

The database size has remained the same as expected. Unfortunately, the available space in the content database didn't change either.

What I noticed is that even if I emptied the site collecton recycle bin, the table RecycleBin has still references to documents of the deleted site.

How can I definetely delete them and recover some available space?

EDIT: This is not a duplicate. I had read the presumed duplicate post. That's why I wrote "The database size has remained the same as expected." I'm talking about the available free size in the content database and not the database size (please read better my post) and if not clear let me know. To add, I wrote about the recyclebin table which still contains the deleted files.

Answer 1

If you still see references to deleted documents in the DB, it may simply means you did not empty the second-level recycle bin. Go to the site collection settings, choose "Recycle bin" and switch the view to the "second stage" recycle bin. There you can really delete all documents. You'll notice that deleting from second-stage bin takes longer than deleting from the user/first-stage bin, since the operation actually removes docs from the DB.