About df and du

cytchiu · 05-29-2009, 03:57 AM

I am running a Redhat EL4 server. When I issued the df command, I found that the mount point / has been used 70%. Everyday I issued the same df command and found that the used space keep increasing 1% every day.

I need to know which file(s) is eating the space, and tried to use the command du. However, it seems that it is not easy to trace the cause. Does anyone know how to do that?

druuna · 05-29-2009, 04:04 AM

Hi,

Although I do think your logfiles are increasing you can zoom in on big files like this (as root):

Code:

cd /
du -sch *

cd <biggest dir>
du -sch *

etc.....

du -sch * will give you a human readable list, something like this:

8.0K Cinelerra
16K Create.Pictures
5.8M Documenten
188M Online.Xs4all
148K Playlists
1.7M Stories
2.5G Uitzoeken
3.6G _Kast
944K _Schuur

In this example Uitzoeken and _Kast are the biggest and you can zoom in on those.

This is one way of doing it, there are probably more.

Hope this helps.

veerain · 05-29-2009, 05:32 AM

Most probably your log files in the /var/log and the files in /tmp.

ncsuapex · 05-29-2009, 07:44 AM

you can do a:

Quote:

du -mx / | sort -n -r | head -n 10

That will give you the top 10 biggest directories starting at the / directory. You can change / to any directory you want and you can change 10 to the number of directories you want listed. The m gives it in megabytes and the x stays on the local system( wont show remote mounted directories)

jonesr · 06-01-2009, 12:33 AM

Yet another -- the 20 largest files modified in the last 24 hours:

Code:

find / -xdev -type f -mtime -1 -exec ls -la {} \; | sort -k5rn | head -20

Compare lists from consecutive days.

cytchiu · 06-02-2009, 05:31 AM

Let me tell you more about my system. I am running a cluster servers, say eform1 & eform2 servers. Both are using oc4j and running a Java app.

The interesting things is, I try to use a freeware Kdirstat to compare the files on both servers. However, I found that the total subtree size for the '/' folder are the same, which is 350M.

Then, I try to type df -h on both servers, the used size are 840M & 669M respectively. And only eform1 server has the file size increment problem, but not the eform2 server.

You can take a look to the screen dump as attached.
Thanks.

druuna · 06-02-2009, 05:41 AM

Hi,

Did you actually try any of the above suggestions to find the big file(s)?

Knowing which file(s) is/are growing will shed some light on this problem.