Missing hardrive space

Lokheed · Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2004 3:30 am Post subject: Missing hardrive space

I keep losing hardrive space. I am on resiserfs.

I started with 895MB free out of 1.0GB on my root parition right after initial install. I have a havent installed anything since then and it jumped down to 833MB free shortly after, now its at 786MB free.

With a search I came up on Linux dedicating 5% for su and means to stop that but the method wasnt for reiserfs.

My portage tmp directory is on usr and I have search for anything and cant find what could be consuming this space...what the hell, is this normal? How do I get back my 100MB? Are there crash dumps in Linux like in Windows and if so where are they placed and can you turn it off?

I am just wondering if this is normal?

potatoface · Guru Joined: 18 Feb 2004 Posts: 542 Location: ::7F00:1

hi,

do

Lokheed · Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2004 5:37 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the reply but asI mentionned that my portage tmp directory is located on usr. Cleaning out distfiles would not affect root either.

I cleared out whatever I could, the space is just missing...it doesnt make sense. I keep reading that reiserfs allocates 10%, 5% to superuser and with the right tools you can set this to 1%.

After my fresh install and installing all my programs I had my root partition at a lean 895MB free, not its down to 830MB. Where did my 60MB go? I would like them back...this happened last time too...dropped some serious MB.

I ran a du. When I check the size of var through konguerer it only says 19MB, but du says its 91MB...

suid77 · Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2004 5:58 pm Post subject:

ReiserFS will often sacrifice a bit by way of disk space in order to gain speed. Your observations seem a little more extreme than I would expect -- but that might be all it is.

Also, I don't know exactly how du works.... if it looks at the files and adds up their sizes, or if it checks how many used/unused blocks there are on your drive and figures out the space from that, but those 2 methods will give different numbers. f.ex. a 103k file will take up more than 103k of disk space. not much more, but if you have a lot of little files it might add up.

-suid77

Lokheed · Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2004 6:39 pm Post subject:

Thanks suid77. Normally it wouldnt concern me but it seems odd that this space isnt gone right away. It took time for me to drop the 60MB. I started with 895MB free and after a day or it was bumped down to 830MB free.

If I started with 803MB free I wouldnt even have thought about it but since it just vanished it is really annoying me. I have search far and wide and there is nothing I can find that gives me an answer...

When I check the sizes of say bin or boot, they match what du spit out. Actually all of them match pretty close, with only a few MB difference, so du is accurate...agh, wtf.

Lokheed · Posted: Wed Sep 01, 2004 1:57 pm Post subject:

ahubu · Posted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 1:38 pm Post subject:

it could be that some misconfiguration or firewall or whatever is clogging your logfiles, or maybe a database file is expanding too fast.

check /var/log directory for huge logfiles, and the appropriate var-subdir for any database app. you are running.

nephros · Posted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 4:29 pm Post subject:

Just a shot in the dark, but do you have a /root/.ccache dir? If yes, how big is it?

If it's present and large, you can call me Legolas and put the CCACHE_DIR varible into /etc/make.conf

Lokheed · Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2004 5:06 am Post subject:

No but thanks for the reply guys...its still an issue. I dont use ccache and none of my log files are huge.

Actually my entire log directory is 1.8 MBs. I cant find it and doing a du on my var doesnt account for the 50 MB of missing space. du tells me its 90 MB and checking the actual folder, it only shows 20 MB...

This is driving me nuts...

ahubu · Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2004 12:39 pm Post subject:

Okay, I have no idea how it is with reiser, but ext3 reserves some space for the superuser on each drive. So it might be that in the beginning it was not yet allocated?

I have some issues myself with diskspace: sometimes I delete a file, the file goes, but the space is not cleared up. It _only_ cleans the space on a reboot :s
I dunno what your reboot policies are, you might be one of those "mymachineisrunningfor3years"-guys

, so maybe that is worth a shot.

Maybe you could try to isolate where the space is going. I use this to view all big directories/files.

Lokheed · Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2004 6:57 pm Post subject:

I reboot on occasion. I just did last night and still nothing. I have heard that reiserfs also allocates a small percentage to su but if thats the case why would it do that after sometime. I used my pc for nearly a day, su'ing and the space was still there, then sure enough, a day or two later, its gone...

The only thing is /var that doesnt make sense coming up as 90MB on du and only showing 20 MB use in Konquerer. I have searched and searched but I havent found any documentation on it. Perhaps this happens to everyone but they just dont notice. I happened to stumble on it doing df's to check to see how much space was used on / after a clean install, but I can see how if you dont do it right after, you would never have known. I wish I did a du on my /var before I lost the space, then I would have known for sure if this reserved space is indeed allocated there...

I guess I will eventually stumble upon it months or maybe years down the road and go "aaahhhh, thats why"...

Thanks for all your imput