Hi there --

I was doing a check of one of the filesystems on a server and noticed its free space was down to ten percent. I went to the filesystem to see what subdirectories were taking up the most space. Upon checking the directories, I did not see any that would appear to be so large they would leave only a small amount of space available. I also checked for hidden files and did not see any that would cause the same problem. What else should I check for to determine why so much diskspace is being used in the one fileystem?

Here are some particulars:
OS: Red Hat 8.0
Filesystem: /dev/sda5 = 1.0 gigabytes. No other filesystems on this mountpoint.

Thanks.

did you check disk usage from root? cd to / and do 'du' again.. you probably did that it seems though.
do you have a swap partition? type 'free' and check that out

Hi there --

I did the du command from the / directory and confirmed the amount of diskspace being used was 116MB out of a possible 1.0 gigabytes.

When I ran the free command, I got the following output:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2064324 2050416 13908 0 46234 1762532
-/+ buffers/cache: 241520 1822804
Swap: 2096472 456672 1639800

do you have 2gb ram? to me it looks like your swap partition is using 456mb or so.
what is the output of 'df -h'? and the output of 'free -m', again? and the output of 'du -hs /'? what does your /etc/fstab file look like?

Hi there --

The system does have two gigabytes of RAM.

The output of the df -h command for the filesystem in question is:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use%
/dev/sda5 980M 838M 93M 90%

The output of the free -m command is as follows:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2015 2005 10 0 30 1747
-/+ buffers/cache: 226 1788
Swap: 2047 449 1598


The output of du -hs / includes some NFS mounts and would be very time consuming to complete. The actual / directory has the following:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use%
/dev/sda8 243M 201M 29M 88%


The /etc/fstab line for the filesystem is shown below:

LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2

whats the output of mount?
what is /dev/sda8 and /dev/sda5? which one is the one that is full and that is mounted as / ?

The output of mount for the two filesystems in question is the following:

/dev/sda8 on / type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sda5 on /home type ext3 (rw)

/dev/sda8 = /
/dev/sda5= /home

/ is at 88% capacity
/home is at 90% capacity