Free space wierdness

[HOLLOW, CHRISTOPHER]

UNIX file caching.  The files were likely deleted but still open by some 
process and therefore still taking up space.  The reboot killed the 
process, released the file and -viola- the free space was reported 
correctly.

HTH,

Christopher Hollow

Herbert Wolverson wrote:

>I have a system running FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE. It primarily functions as a firewall and 
>router, and is generally pretty lightly loaded (load averages around 0.2). It
>is a low end system (P200, 64mb RAM, 2 gig hard drive), and is generally
>stable as a rock.
>
>The system has drives setup as follows:
>/	256M (UFS)
>/usr	1.2gb (UFS+Softupdates)
>(/var and /tmp are linked onto /usr/var and /usr/tmp respectively)
>
>This morning I noticed that the "/" partition was at 108% utilization,
>and "df -h" looked like this (approximately):
>
>Filesystem    Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
>/dev/ad0s1a   252M   256M  -8M    108%     /
>
>Oddly, "du -h -d1 -x" showed only a total of 29Mb used on the partition!
>The output looked like this:
>
>su-2.05b# du -h -d1 -x
> 68K    ./dev
>2.0K    ./usr
>2.7M    ./stand
>1.3M    ./etc
>512B    ./proc
>4.0M    ./bin
>542K    ./boot
>2.0K    ./mnt
>6.4M    ./modules
> 30K    ./root
> 12M    ./sbin
>4.0K    ./tmp
>4.0K    ./oldvar
> 29M    .
>
>When I rebooted the system (without deleting any files), "df -h" showed
>the following:
>
>Filesystem    Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
>/dev/ad0s1a   252M    29M   203M    12%    /
>
>This is good, since the correct amount of free space now shows, and the
>server is back to running perfectly. Can anyone shed any light as to why
>this discrepancy happened in the first place? I'd love to know what I can do to avoid ever having to worry
>about this again!
>
>Thanks,
>Herbert Wolverson,
>The Turner Stephenson Group, Inc.
>http://www.tsghelp.com/
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>
>  
>

-- 
Christopher Hollow - Technical Consultant
Infrastructure & Technology Support
Toronto, ON