[Techtalk] home directory/raid array mystery

[Maria Mckinley]

On 11/11/10 5:31 PM, Daniel Pittman wrote:
> Maria Mckinley<maria at shadlen.org>  writes:
>> On 11/11/10 4:24 PM, Kathryn Hogg wrote:
>>> Alina Friedrichsen wrote:
>>>>
>>>> tried to run "du -h"?
>>>
>>> I like to pipe that into sort -h
>>
>> Great idea. Not sure why doing that has never occur to me. I don't see the h
>> option on the man sort page, and I get an error if I try to use it.
>>
>> But, I think you meant:
>>
>> du -h |sort -n
>>
>> or my preference when just looking for who to point the finger at:
>>
>> du -h --max-depth=1 |sort -n
>>
>> I wonder if my RAID array has just become completely fragmented, because du
>> does look at hidden directories, and this is such a crazy discrepancy
>> between du and df.
>
> G'day.  One of the hidden places that you can lose space - and which shows up
> exactly as a difference between 'du' and 'df' - is that if you file is
> "deleted" but some application still has it open then it still takes up space.
>
> You can use fuser, lsof, or the output of 'ls -l /proc/[0-9]*/fd' to help
> identify where that is used.
>
> If you restart whatever application had the huge file open the space should
> come back.  (Which is why a restart of the system often "fixes" this problem,
> too. :)
>
> Regards,
>          Daniel


Aha, I bet this is it! Now that you mention it, I did have a user that 
had a file growing to crazy proportions a couple of days ago (it was 
over 350GB when I saw it). I asked him to fix his code and get rid of 
the file, but I bet he didn't kill the process! Thanks a bunch.

~maria