my root partition (/) fills up regularly for very short periodes of time (< 1 minute). This temporarily causes issues with my database (for instance)
/home and /boot are fine. it’s only the root-partition (see screenshot). it goes from 40% free space to 0and back up to 40% in a matter of a few minutes.
I can’t figure out what’s causing this and can’t even find which folders or files are being filled. It happen at random intervals (it seems). I’ve setup a cron task to output the results of a “du” command to a logfile every 5 minutes but even that doesn’t give me a good pointer.
you need to find whats growing so fast. maybe logs?
when it’s 0% free space, what’s the output of
du -skh /var/*
just a guess, but check various directories to identify what’s taking up the space.
Maybe kill the server and reinstate ? Then install what you had before the problem and the install domains 1 by 1 untill you hit the issue which may or may not show up the problem.
This assumes you have backups
It could be a cron job that is the culprit, if the incident occurs in a set frequency. Or even a virtual server owner manually creating a 30+ GB backup, which could take up space temporarily. There might be other possibilities…
ok so I’ve setup a small cron-script to log some disk size every minute.
At this point the almalinux-root-disk is 96% full
but the root dir (/) is only using 42 GB (roughly 50%)
What am I missing here?
So I’ve disabled my scheduled backups and that has improved things drastically (it still happens but at a much lower frequency + with less impact). Obviously I need backups so I’ll need to figure something out to make this work again. I’m thinking about moving my MariaDB databases from /var to /home.
Earlier today I changed the webmin tmp directory to the /home partition and ran a dbdump… which caused my sites to go down again when it hit the biggest database (10 GB). So that’s defenitely the cause.
