I have a VPS with a company on the web. I installed ngetty and as a result reclaimed 105MB on the VPS. The VPS instantly show the additional 105MB free space. Now, several days later, the VPS is down to 56MB of free space. I have purged all logs and other data files that periodically increase their size, but the purge doesn't make a dent in the free space loss. This is not a problem of any kind and the free space doesn't go much below 56MB, but I was just wondering what is caused its decrease in the first place. Is debian/linux allocating 1/2 the free space for itself?

Did you restart the services that which created the logs? Otherwise the space will not be freed.

Interesting, no I didn't know I had to do that.