[CentOS] HDD usage oddity

Thu Nov 22 00:49:46 UTC 2007
Garrick Staples <garrick at usc.edu>

On Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 07:37:31PM -0500, Ugo Bellavance alleged:
> Hi,
> 
> 	2 of my Centos4 servers are showing weird behavior.
> 
> [root at server1 ~]# du -sh /var/
> 1.8G    /var/
> [root at server1 ~]# df -h /var
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda7             4.3G  3.9G  181M  96% /var
> 
> [root at server2 var]# df -h /var
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda7             2.9G  2.7G     0 100% /var
> [root at server2 var]# du -sh /var/
> 1.6G    /var/
> 
> du seems to be reporting the right size

Neither is more "correct".  They report different things.  'df' reports on the
number of blocks in use by the filesystem.  'du' crawls the filesystem and
reports the number of blocks used by files.

So what you have here is disk usage by stuff that isn't linked into the
filesystem.  This would mean deleted files that are still opened by processes.

Try 'lsof /var | grep deleted' to list deleted and open files.

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