Filled up the filesystem. How?

[Rick Stevens]

Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On 6/8/05, john bray <jmblin at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
>>On Wed, 2005-06-08 at 01:06 +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
>>
>>>On 6/8/05, Alexander Dalloz <ad+lists at uni-x.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>>Am Di, den 07.06.2005 schrieb Dotan Cohen um 23:39:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>Last week I wrote that I somehow filled 7 out of 10 megs in my linux
>>>>>partition. Today that last bit was filled- I am at 100% capacity.
>>>>>
>>>>>I cannot download email or create new files. What could be the cause
>>>>>of this? Where should I look for bloat? What can I delete?
>>>>>
>>>>>Dotan
>>>>
>>>>This can easily be happen if log files fill very quickly. I.e. if you
>>>>have Apache running, a fault in your page and quite some hits, the
>>>>error_log can grow rapidly. So watch out for large log files.
>>>>
>>>>Alexander
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>--
>>>>Alexander Dalloz | Enger, Germany | GPG http://pgp.mit.edu 0xB366A773
>>>>legal statement: http://www.uni-x.org/legal.html
>>>>Fedora Core 2 GNU/Linux on Athlon with kernel 2.6.11-1.27_FC2smp
>>>>Serendipity 23:54:54 up 14 days, 22:32, load average: 0.38, 0.53, 0.49
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>BodyID:69189987.2.n.logpart (stored separately)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>/var/logs is 23 megs (same as last week)
>>>/var is 1.3 gigs (same as last week)
>>>/usr is 3.7 gigs (same as last week)
>>>/proc is 480 megs (same as last week)
>>>
>>>I only checked those because those were the biggies last week. The
>>>system is so slow now that it takes a long time for it to caculate
>>>those values. Where else should I look?
>>>
>>>Dotan
>>>
>>>
>>
>>hey dotan -  have you checked the size and how many files are in /tmp?
>>i've seen systems do that when some dolt program creates and doesn't
>>clean up tons of files in /tmp
>>
>>john
>>
>>
> 
> 
> Yes, when I checked the directory tree I check /tmp. It is empty. As
> about the only thing that I can do on this machine is browse the web,
> I have been looking for a command that will show me all large
> files/directories. I thought that df would do it, but man doesn't seem
> to know of any option that would do this. Nor does google!
> 
> How does one go about searching for bloat? All the obvious (logs, tmp,
> yum clean all) leave no hints. Last thing that I want to do is to tell
> Ety to log onto the windows machine because linux is broken!!!

Figure out what you consider a "bloated" file, then

	find / -size +nnn[c|k] -print

For example, if you feel 200MB is bloated:

	find / -size +200000k -print

will display all files 200MB (200,000kB) or larger.

> I thought of waiting for FC4 and just rm'ing the whole drive (I
> managed to back up /home/whats_important_to_me onto a 256 XD card with
> a usb card reader), but we need the machine daily.
> 
> Please, any other ideas about what to check, and what I can erase are
> seriously needed right about now. If someone I trust (the names
> Dalloz, Lynch and a few others come to mind) want to ssh in, I'll see
> if I can set up the daemon. Thanks all, I always appreciate your help.
> And your willingness to teach patiently.

Have you checked to see if your machine is swapping?  Use "free" and
see how much free memory you have.  "vmstat 5" will also show you if
you're swapping.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-     Is that a buffer overflow or are you just happy to see me?     -
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