Debian slowly eating disk space?

[Simon]

Hi There,

We have a debian etch server with a 4.0GB / disk. It runs mysql on a
separate 80GB disk, which has plenty of space free.... Doing a "du -hs
*" on the root directory and counting up all the files on /, we get
1.5GB of files (approx)... but there is only 100MB left on the disk
and it is slowly getting less and less... Got me a little stumped! The
server has a separate 512MB SWAP, of which 498348k is free... i dont
get it :) any ideas on what to check on here?

Many thanks!

Simon

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[Jan Bakuwel]

Hi Simon,

Post by Simon
Hi There,
We have a debian etch server with a 4.0GB / disk. It runs mysql on a
separate 80GB disk, which has plenty of space free.... Doing a "du -hs
*" on the root directory and counting up all the files on /, we get
1.5GB of files (approx)... but there is only 100MB left on the disk
and it is slowly getting less and less... Got me a little stumped! The
server has a separate 512MB SWAP, of which 498348k is free... i dont
get it :) any ideas on what to check on here?

Most likely the space will be taken up by deleted files that are still open.

lsof will likely tell you more.

cheers,
Jan


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[Daniel Pittman]

Post by Simon
We have a debian etch server with a 4.0GB / disk. It runs mysql on a
separate 80GB disk, which has plenty of space free.... Doing a "du -hs *" on
the root directory and counting up all the files on /, we get 1.5GB of files
(approx)... but there is only 100MB left on the disk and it is slowly
getting less and less... Got me a little stumped!

There are two things that could be eating that space, but the most likely one
is an unlinked logfile that is just growin' away.

You can track those down with fuser, lsof, or the content of /proc/$pid/fd,
and the log file will go away when you restart whatever service or application
is keeping that last reference open. (Rebooting does that, so obviously will
work to free the space too. :)

Did you recently delete a MySQL log file because it was growing all huge and
not rotating? Try telling MySQL to rotate logs...

Daniel

[Simon]

Post by Daniel Pittman
There are two things that could be eating that space, but the most likely one
is an unlinked logfile that is just growin' away.
You can track those down with fuser, lsof, or the content of /proc/$pid/fd,
and the log file will go away when you restart whatever service or application
is keeping that last reference open.  (Rebooting does that, so obviously will
work to free the space too. :)

Thanks for the quick suggestions ppl.. It was unlined files in the
/tmp directory - you learn something every day! :) Love it.

Restarted the application and all is well again. Researching the issue
for a long term fix, but we have a workable workaround for the moment.

Many thanks.

Simon

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