@Michael Bronson After configuration changes, it's safe to restart required services, those restart will make necessary new changes into the system. In our case, yarn.nodemanager.local-dirs will point out to new location /grid/sdb/hadoop/yarn/local instead of old location /var/hadoop/yarn/local . In short, restart will not cause any issue either after delete old files or after change in YARN configuration. I hope this answered your concerns.