wierd problem - Disk Utilization
 

Hi All,

I gave a interview yesterday. I did well on all files / server configuration etc.

I could not answer few questions, one of them is :-



We have a partition say /tmp of 2 GB, in df -kh command it is showing all utilized i.e. 100 % disk utilization.
BUT when we fire command du -sk /tmp, it is showing only 1 GB. How will you trouble shoot this.



Pls help me with this.

Thanks in advance.

You could use lsof.

Could you please explain a bit. How would lsof help me. It will only show me which all files are being used at that point of time.

Exactly, and sizes of files that are currently being written to, or, are open for writing, do not always reflect actual size on disk.

Use lsof to determine what process(es) are using the file, then either wait for the process to finish, or somehow, terminate the process, then look again at the file size.

Yes it would have showed files that are not viewable also, like in the instance of oracle which uses space but creates no visible file.

Oh, also it may be out of inodes because they don't always take up all the disk space but will give the error the file system is full because there is a limit to 'how many' files may be on a file system as well.

You could delete loads of small files that were not needed to cure the problem.

Thanks to all, I should have though that ways :)