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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

#481

Post by jacobsenscott »

waheoo wrote: post #361
_carbyau_ wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed a weird thing here. All the regular pasta rapidly disappeared. Rice also was gone. But "Gluten Free"(I am a GFer) pasta - in this case, pasta made from rice - was fine! I amused myself with the idea that people:"would rather starve to death than eat that GF crap." :-)

Pasta didn't sell out because people were afraid of starving. Pasta sold out because people didn't know how to cook anything else themselves.

I know how to cook, but when you suddenly have to cook 2x as often because you can't eat out anymore your are going to cook a lot more of everything, including pasta. Suddenly the supply chain was out of whack - it was built for people that eat out a lot.

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

#483

Post by snowwrestler »

JustARandomGuy wrote: post #456
_carbyau_ wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed a weird thing here. All the regular pasta rapidly disappeared. Rice also was gone. But "Gluten Free"(I am a GFer) pasta - in this case, pasta made from rice - was fine! I amused myself with the idea that people:"would rather starve to death than eat that GF crap." :-)

Out of curiosity: did people really experience empty grocery shelves or are phrases such as "rapidly disappeared" meant more as hyperbole? I live in a Chicago suburb, and while variety did decrease (I still can't get Coke Zero Cherry) the basics were always in stock throughout the pandemic time.

Some grocery items actually went into scarcity.

Why? Because the channel mix changed, and distribution and packaging are channel-specific.

For example, toilet paper is shipped to commercial customers in cardboard boxes, while retail customers by it in plastic-wrapped, branded, and SKU’d blocks of 4, 8, 12, etc. When everyone suddenly stopped going to offices and restaurants, demand plummeted in the commercial channel and soared in the retail channel. It took time for factories and distributors to adjust to that. The same thing happened to a bunch of food staples too.

Since a lot of manufacturing is regional, different areas of the nation and world experienced different impacts.

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

#484

Post by encryptluks2 »

reph2097 wrote: post #342
anonymousisme wrote: post #274

One thing that many Linux/Unix users do not know is that all commonly used filesystems have a "reserved" amount of space to which only "root" can write. The typical format (mkfs) default is to leave 5% of the disk reserved. The reserved space can be modified (by root) any time, and it can be specified as a block count or a percentage. As long as your application does not have root privileges, it will hit the wall whe…

Of course the application is running as root, duh.

And that would be another issue that should be addressed.

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

#485

Post by anonu »

wp381640 wrote: post #442
ABeeSea wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lotus to Exchange migrations were all likely in the pre-Sarbanes Oxley and other retention regular era of email retention requirements iirc at the time the only industries that required retention were health, legal and government With SOX (PCI, FDIC, et al) retention laws we had another explosion of work rolling out all the compliance features of Exchange Those were crazy times getting everybody either migrated with…

I was using lotus at one of the largest banks in 2015... So no. Not pre sox.

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

#486

Post by Diesel555 »

>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 found a bug with time machine where it wouldn't delete local copies properly and filled my hard drive until I couldn't do anything. The OS slowly stopped working. At first I couldn't copy or save anything, then deleting files made more files. It was so bad that the `rm` command eventually wouldn't work from recovery or the local OS. I could do nothing. I had to format.

It happened again and I learned to manually delete the time machine local snapshots, but it was crazy how hard it was to recover once it took all my storage. That bug is fixed now.

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

#487

Post by kmonsen »

njovin wrote: post #335
victor9000 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect example of the tragedy of the commons. If individuals don't create these balloon files then they won't be able to use the file server when they need it, yet by creating these balloon files the collective action depletes the shared resource of its main function.

This is similar to how some government agencies retain their budgets. At the end of the budget period they've only spent 80% of their allocated budget, so they throw out a bunch of perfectly good equipment/furniture/etc. and order new stuff so that their budget doesn't get cut the following year, rather than accepting that maybe they were over-budgeted to begin with. Rinse, repeat, thus continuing the cycle of wastin…

I was in the army, they had a certain budget for bullets. Last day of the year we shoot the rest because if not they would get less next year.

We shot so much we destroyed some of the rifles, apparently that was better than getting a smaller allocation next year.

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

#488

Post by agumonkey »

chihuahua wrote: post #429
agumonkey wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering if not all of human society is game theory through time/space taxes and prices.

That is how economists view the world.

I was more on a sociological/existential plane but I take that information too. I wish I'd read this kind of economic books rather than supply/demand or finance

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

#489

Post by kmonsen »

rgj wrote: post #79

In the mid nineties I worked in a research institute. There was a large shared Novell drive which was always on the verge of full. Almost every day we were asked to clean up our files as much as possible. There were no disc quota for some reason. One day I was working with my colleague and when the fileserver was full he went to a project folder and removed a file called balloon.txt which immediately freed up a few p…

I remember in Android one year the focus was on slimming down the memory usage. Of course we found an app that shall not be named the allocated a chunk of memory on startup just in case it was going to be needed later.

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

#490

Post by dilyevsky »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #479
dilyevsky wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setup proper monitoring and never get to the Real Issue to begin with. These sysadmin hacks are not helpful

Keep in mind that sysadmins are essentially babysitting software that they do not develop. The hacks that we come up with are to work around responsible party and help us get a good night's sleep instead of a 2am wakeup call. I try to cut you guys some slack, usually this proliferates when management decides they are willing to accept some inefficiency in favor of getting new features out the door. I get it, really.…

How does using proposed solution prevents a 2am wake up call? Your monitoring/alerting does, this just makes it easier to recover already broken software. And btw I’ve been carrying pagers for more than a decade so well aware of all the organizational dynamics here. Best way to prevent this is have devs carrying pager too (amazons “you built it you run it”) - and magically your nighttime oncall is much more pleasant ;-)
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