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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

#391
post #146

[flagged]

This is the opposite of private property ownership. Property ownership comes at a cost. That cost increases as supply dries up. In this case there is no cost to the individual, only to the group.

>In this case there is no cost to the individual, only to the group.

So like all the externalities and their associated costs that capitalism throws at us without a single care...

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

#392
post #379
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why not just tell Exchange to delete any emails older than 5 years (or whatever your lawyers tell you to put)?

I imagine it looks better at discovery time to say 'oh sorry we lost these emails because we ran out of disk space' rather than 'we deleted them because we didn't want you to read them'.

No, companies need to be able to point to an official retention policy that says in writing that emails older then x months or years get deleted. Most do (including my employer), and it's because of legal discovery. But it feels like we're lobotomizing ourselves, as often the reason some odd thing was done was based on a long-deleted email discussion.

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

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is to do exactly what they tell you not too immediately. Masks don't protect against covid - jump on Alibaba and buy some. Don't buy extra toiled paper, there will be no limits on its sale - immediately do a order on amazon prime. Because within a few days there will be price caps on the sale of TP (increased prices would deter hoarding) so everything will sell out right away. I think people have really lea…

I think you’ve just described a self-fulfilling prophecy. TP is running out because enough people think like you, turning a not-scarce commodity into a scarce commodity.

True, but if you are already aware of this the only logical solution is to join in, otherwise you’d just end up with no toilet paper.

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

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, swap is actually needed for some memory operations. And when you run out of memory, the behaviour is often worse without swap. These days I always at least configure an in-memory compressed swap (zram).

You recall incorrectly; swap is not needed. It's not just me who runs without it; Google production machines did for many years. "The behavior is often worse without swap" is more vague / subjective. I prefer that a process die cleanly than everything slow to a crawl semi-permanently. I've previously written about swap causing the latter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13715917 To some extent the bad behavior c…

I'm surprised that the swap implementation (or distros swap configuration) is so bad on Linux. I have a fresh Ubuntu 20.10 desktop installation and a few times it has come to slow crawl where you can't do anything, can't escape to tty or ssh, reboot is basically the only option.

I recently learned searching the internets that it was the swapfile configuration. My 16GB RAM machine got a 2GB swapfile from the default installation so I doubled it to 4GB, but today it almost got full again, luckily I was just about to close a big memory hog and that saved me. I have now increased the swapfile to 6GB.

If Ubuntu is giving default installations 2GB of swapfile on 16GB of RAM, shouldn't this happen to lots of users quite frequently? How many users are technical enough to understand this and fix it? How can this be a good solution?

I can't recall that I ever got in trouble on Windows because of the swapfile.

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

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You have an easy way to fix it, just delete the spacer file. But what good does that do? You solve the issue right then and there. Step 1. realize there is a space issue and get to terminal Step 2. free space so any solution has memory Step 3. Solve by doing

Let me try to explain what the other person is saying. If you have an 8gb spacer file, at some point the disk will get full and cause some errors, so you will have to log in, remove the spacer file and then deal with the problem. If you have an alarm for 8gb remaining, you will receive the alarm before any application ever notices the disk is full. You will have basically the same amount of time to solve the problem…

Your described scenario is no different than when you would have set your first warning at 16GB disk space, except that you won't have to scramble to delete the roadblock halfway between here and the crash zone.

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

#397

[flagged]

I still know people that pre-emptively buy toilet paper "because hoarders might buy the rest of it" with absolutely no introspection.

The Costco I shop at only seems to sell the good Charmine toilet paper (the red stuff that doesn't leave lint and TP balls everywhere) during February. If I want enough to last, I have to stock up for about a year's worth at once. As you might imagine, this figure is rather difficult to estimate for in advance.

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

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a large company during a migration from Lotus to Outlook. We were told we'd get our current Lost email storage + 100MiB as a new email quota limit under Outlook. I made a bunch of 100MiB files of `/dev/random` noise (so they don't compress, compressed size was part of the quota) and emailed them to myself before the migration, to get a few GiB of quota buffer. My co-workers were constantly having to delet…

Email quotas aren’t just a cost thing. It forces deletion of files/communications that aren’t relevant anymore. The last thing the legal department wants is some executive’s laptop with 10 years of undeleted email to make it’s way to discovery.

Also prevents users from using email as a filing cabinet or shared drive.

Email hosts love 50/100gb/unlimited mailboxes because nobody wants to migrate a bunch of giant mailboxes

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

#400
post #392
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine it looks better at discovery time to say 'oh sorry we lost these emails because we ran out of disk space' rather than 'we deleted them because we didn't want you to read them'.

No, companies need to be able to point to an official retention policy that says in writing that emails older then x months or years get deleted. Most do (including my employer), and it's because of legal discovery. But it feels like we're lobotomizing ourselves, as often the reason some odd thing was done was based on a long-deleted email discussion.

And the right way to do it is with an archiving service/appliance
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