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All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

brianschrader.com

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Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

#92
I remember a discussion here about a dude who did this with memory in game development. People didn't like the idea very much.

To me it has a taste of domain squatting or GPU scalping, but you don't do it with strangers, but your team.

Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

#94

All my servers have an alarm when disk space goes above 70%. It sends an email every hour once the disk usage goes above 70%. Never had a server go down because of disk space issue after adopting this practise. Also one of the main reasons server disks go full is generally log files. Always remember to "logrotate" your log files and you will not have this issue that much. Yes one more thing, for all user uploaded fil…

Is there a package I can install to set this up?

Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

#95

Ah, the classic 'speed-up loop' approach: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop About the blogpost itself: The disk filled up, and that's one thing you don't want on a Linux server—or a Mac for that matter. When the disk is full nothing good happens. I had this happen few times on a Mac and every time I was shocked that if disk gets full you cannot even delete a file and the only option is to do a full sy…

MacOS has given the user nagging "startup disk is almost full " prompts for as long as I can remember, yours doesn't?

Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

#98

All my servers have an alarm when disk space goes above 70%. It sends an email every hour once the disk usage goes above 70%. Never had a server go down because of disk space issue after adopting this practise. Also one of the main reasons server disks go full is generally log files. Always remember to "logrotate" your log files and you will not have this issue that much. Yes one more thing, for all user uploaded fil…

Is there a package I can install to set this up?

Icinga is a common solution for monitoring FS and other use metrics. I imagine his setup, if custom rolled, is a shell script checking df and sending an email when the usage is at or above 70

Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

#100
post #90

No. Careful partitioning is the solution to this problem. Monitor the growth of your partitions and make sure nothing on rootfs or other sensitive partitions grow significantly.

I don't think this has to be an either/or scenario. Having some bloat you can get rid of quickly is a nice backup in case your monitoring fails for whatever reason.
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