Disappearing Disk Space

techiegoob · n00b Joined: 08 Sep 2004 Posts: 4

I have a strange issue that is happening on a Gentoo box. This box is used as a MythTV backend for recording shows and running MythWeb. I do not use this box for any viewing, I have another gentoo box hooked to the TV that I use MythFrontend to watch and delete shows. When I delete a show using the MythTV frontend or from MythWeb the physical .nuv file is deleted off the hard drive but the size of the used space reported by df is incorrect. If I du it shows the correct size. If I reboot the computer the used space is corrected and appears fine. If I delete more shows it starts again.

This past weekend I moved all the files off the drive and reformated from reiser to xfs. The issue is still happening.

angoraspruce · Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2005 6:58 pm Post subject:

I've seen this happen when I've deleted a file that had been opened by a yet running process. 'du' showed the space freed up, but 'df' said it was still there. Killing the running process that claimed the file put 'du' and 'df' back into sync (or in as much sync as they ever tend to be). So when you rebooted, you were bringing all processes to an end, including the one fooling 'df' into thinking the delted file still existed.

My guess is that when you delete the files with the frontend (or whatever), another program already has them "open" in a read mode, probably ready for playing. <shrug> Make sense?

HTH

Sm1 · Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2005 8:40 pm Post subject:

I had this issue back in myth .16. Moving up to myth .17/cvs resolved the issue ( at least for me)

ahubu · Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2005 3:49 am Post subject:

I have this issue sometimes when deleting with the rox filemanager, and it is quite possible it was being read-accessed by another program (p2p, file transfer). I can't remember when it happened the last time, but it happened pretty frequently and the only way I could correct it was by rebooting indeed. However, I think that the space was usable again, just the report was wrong.
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BlackEdder · Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2005 10:32 am Post subject:

Because linux handles files differently they aren't locked, but a delete will just remove the pointer tpo the file -> as long as another process is accessing the file the space will still be taken, but new processes can't find the file. The solution is to do a lsof | grep file and kill the process using the file (or wait patiently till the process is finished with the file.
Mythtv probably opens all files readonly, so the files stay there.

techiegoob · n00b Joined: 08 Sep 2004 Posts: 4

I worked on this last night and after stopping the MythBackend using /etc/init.d/mythbackend stop the file space issue was resolved. I am still running .16. I will be updating to .17 this weekend.