Free space wierdness

HOLLOW, CHRISTOPHER christopher.hollow at cgi.com
Thu Feb 5 13:48:02 PST 2004


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





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