Re: Remaining diskspace confusion - "df" contradicts other info.

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Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 01:10:42 -0500

In article <41f5b9fd$1@news1.homechoice.co.uk>,
 "Dave Smithz" <SPAM FREE WORLD> wrote:

> Hi There,
>
> I wanted to do a mysqldump on a live system and under no circumstances do I
> want to break the system. Therefore being very careful I was checking
> certain things out.
>
> To my webspace my control panel informs me I have used about 50mb of my
> 600mb available. However login in via SSH to run the mysqldump, I done a df
> (with limited understanding of the command) and I got the following:
>
> Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda1 99150 79134 14896 85% /
> /dev/sda2 1007896 865348 91348 91% /usr
> /dev/sda5 4031680 1769432 2057448 47% /var
> /dev/sda6 14939148 13231964 948300 94% /home
> /dev/sda7 14939148 5742964 8437300 41% /home2
>
>
> Now this says to me there is not much space in the home dir.
> When I do a pwd the path is
> /home/myusername
>
> (Note that this is a shared hosting account box)
>
> Now this leads me to believe that although I should have 550mb of space, the
> home folder is almost full.

Sure it's 94% full, but it's such a large disk that 6% is still plenty
of space.

> Therefore if I do my mysqldump, I could actually make the machine run out of
> disk space making all kind of nasty things happen.

No you can't. There's over 900MB available, as shown in the above
output.

>
> At first I was going to ask "Can anyone enlighten me on what I am reading
> wrong, or have I spotted a potential error?"

You certainly do seem to be reading something wrong. Don't you see
948,300KB in the Available column?

> But discovering df -h led me to the real sizes. So there is actually 926MB
> remaining and 13G used. However, does this not still seem a little low. If

How is that significantly different from what you showed above?

> other users suddenly maxed out their account we would be running at almost
> full capacity (if not over) and should not files systems stay under 90% on
> UNIX boxes.

It's not uncommon to oversubscribe like this, since most users don't use
their entire quota. If you have 100 customers, and 5 of them use 90% of
their quota, while the rest only average 25% of their quota, more than
70% of your disk would be wasted.

Notice that they've added a second disk, /home2. They're probably in
the process of migrating some customers over to that disk because /home
is nearing capacity.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***

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