LinuxQuestions.org - Disk Space Issues

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Disk Space Issues

Hi All,

I am a Linux newbie so bear with me on this one ;)

I have a server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES v4 which only has one 3rd party application running on it.

One step of this application is to create auto save files of the data it has in memory every 15 mins and store them to disk, the 2nd part of this process is to delete auto save files over 'n' hours old and this looks to be where our problem lies.

It would seem that when the old auto save files are deleted the space they were using is not being released by the os correctly so our disk space is being eaten up pretty quickly, our current estimates are we will run out of space in 10 days.

As a quick test I re-booted the server and all of the space was then released but since the re-boot it is again being eaten up at a rate of about 4gb per day so will erquire another re-boot in a few days.

Has anyone seen a similar problem to this or can anyone offer any advice on how to get this space back without the re-boot process.

Thanks in advance

Dave.

I use find to remove files that are over a certian age. For example, delete the gz and log files which are over 3 months ( +90 ) .....

Code:

#Delete old files with the following command

find /mnt/backup -type f \( -name '*.gz' -o -name '*.log' \) \

-mtime +90 -exec rm {} \;

Check out man find.

Hi Homey,

the problem is we have already identified that there are no actual files using up this disk space :scratch:

Therefore it looks like when files are deleted the space they were occupying on the disk is not being released so everytime the software clears down 100mb of logfiles the files are deleted but the space is not being released and the disk usage value just keeps going up and up.

Dave.

If a file is being used by a process, "has one 3rd party application running on it." , the free space may not show up until you kill that process.
Might work to stop the application before deleting the files, then restart it after.

Hi Homey,

Interesting thought!

It is a 3rd party app which is creating the auto save / log files which would seem to account for the space, but part of the applications own internal process is to clear these files down on a regular basis so only a few days worth of logs are kept.

Killing the app to cleardown the files is not an option as the software is a real time scheduling tool which is used by a call center to schedule engineer appointments with customers so is used during the day to input appointments and then schedules the appropriate engineer to the call. All of this runs in memory so the process of shutting down and rebuilding the data back into memory is possible but can only be done overnight and is a manual prcess which cannot be automated.

I will run a test on our development server and let it chew up some space and then kill the app and see what happens to the disk space, could be an interesting result if killing the app releases the space which the app claims to have already deleted.

Thanks for your help,

Dave.