[SOLVED] Something took a lot of space out of nowhere (?)

todovvox · 04-17-2022, 01:36 PM

Hey, my distribution is Debian. I'm using i3wm. Just seconds ago - I was using youtube, bluetooth manager and discord, while listening to music and reading a book. I saw something changing on my i3 bar, so I checked it and it was my disk's space going down. It was around 100GB, and it got down to 84GB. I couldn't find what was causing it, so I've rebooted my system - I was curious if some task used my disk as some sort of temporary storage, but no. The memory stays at 84GB right now. If I didn't stop that back then, it would go even further.

When I have opened htop back then, it showed two tasks of rsyslogd taking up like 70% of CPU, and on top of that was systemd-journald, which was taking 100%.

After the reboot everything is below 10% on htop. What caused this? How can I check where the space went?

todovvox · 04-17-2022, 02:04 PM

Okay, I think I know the reason - something was not stable with my USB port. I'm using headphones on bluetooth, and just seconds before the disk space was being taken over it was pinging with a lot of logs into logfiles in my /var/log dir. After using cat on the logfiles, it showed a lot of pulseaudio logs writing to them. Same message, over and over.

After truncating the logfiles - 21GBs of space got freed.

killerhippy · 04-18-2022, 04:56 AM

Hello Todovvox,

the necessity of finding big files occurred from time to time here, too.
So I googled and wrote a script that should help me in these cases.

Here it is:

Quote:

#!/bin/sh
usage () {
echo "$0 [OPTIONS]"
echo "OPTIONS ARE:"
echo "<path>"
}
# check given option
if [ "$#" -lt 1 ]; then
echo "Need path"
usage
exit 1
fi

find "$1" -mount -size +10M -exec ls -hs {} \; | sort -nr

MadeInGermany · 04-19-2022, 11:55 AM

Another quick helper

Code:

du -akx | sort -n

If open files are deleted then they still occupy disk space (so don't do that). You can still find them with

Code:

lsof | grep "(deleted)"