Disc Free (df) weirdness (FC2)

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 20:10 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
> Today, I looked at my disc free space, after deleting some files.
> I found that, after deleting approx. 28M of files, that df reported
> the disc as being 93% full. Well, the last time I tried looking,
> it was 85% full, just a couple of days ago. I have created a couple
> of text files, and read some e-mail. But why was my disc 8% more
> full than before?
> 
> I searched and searched for where the space was hiding, and could
> not find it. I was comparing with the output from the earlier
> du -s /some/path/* | sort -gr | head, and couldn't find it.
> 
> I did some sync commands, and tried again, and it just looked
> like things should be smaller.
> 
> Eventually, I rebooted. Now du thinks that my disc is 84% full.
> 
> I don't automatically delete /tmp, and it only has 136M in it,
> anyway.
> 
> $ df
> Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda5              7633264   6081748   1163768  84% /
> /dev/hda3                99075     24602     69358  27% /boot
> none                    124044         0    124044   0% /dev/shm
> 
> At 93%, it must have been about 7098935 blocks used. How did a
> reboot free up 1017187 blocks?
> 
> $ du --version
> du (coreutils) 5.2.1
> $ uname -a
> Linux Presario-1 2.6.10-1.771_FC2 #1 Mon Mar 28 00:50:14 EST 2005 i686 
> i686 i386 GNU/Linux
----
since basically everything is in /dev/hda5 I would venture to guess that
you have a lot of space tied up in /var that you aren't considering
how/when things go there.

du -sh /var/log
du -sh /var/cache/yum

Don't know what you are doing with this system and you may be able to
make space by doing things like 'yum clean all' or removing the log
rotations #'d .1 .2 .3 .4 in /var/log which can grow really large if you
are logging firewall stuff on a cable modem connection. Also, if you
crank up the log level on some stuff (ldap or samba come immediately to
mind - like samba log level 10) can really log a ton of stuff in very
little time.

Craig


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