Would be better to leave 8GB unpartitioned and then expand the partition. An 8GB file on an SSD is removing 8GB worth of blocks from being able to participate in wear leveling.
All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
501–510 of 715 posts
Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#502mkfs has an option to reserve a %age or # of blocks/inodes for root of a file system. It's the file system equivalent of empty files.
Usually when free space is exhausted, it's for non-root users. You get that same "time to fix stuff by deleting the file" by using tunefs to change that root reserved space to zero.
Plus have /var/log on a separate file system and make sure that your log rotations are based on size as well as time.
Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a perfect world, this is true. But we don't have one of those.
That’s not perfect world this is standard industry practice to have host level monitoring
Of course! But do you put all your trust in your monitoring, 100%? You've never had monitoring fail for any reason at all? You've never had a server fill up before you can respond to the alert?
This 8gb file idea isn't to replace monitoring. It's to offer a quick stopgap solution so you can do things in a hurry and give yourself a little extra "out" when things go awry. Because believe me, they WILL go awry. And if you're not prepared for that eventuality, then I don't know what else to say.
Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tragedy of the Commons is the libertarian "private property is essential" interpretation. It's a cynical take, assuming that human selfishness is the deepest of truths and that there is no use fighting it, that the best solution is to organize society around it. The conventional Game Theory take is that this is a prisoners dilemma, and everyone creating balloon.txt files are defecting. They are making the most ration…
Tragedy of the Commons effects are well-established to exist both in economics and outside it (in ecology, for instance). You seem to be attempting to shoehorn some misguided political take into the situation, even though Tragedy of the Commons is a decent characterization of this particular social pathology.
Their point was that tragedy of the commons need not be a given anywhere we see tragedies or commons. Last paragraph is lofty but I think the whole idea is we have the cognitive ability to deliberately prove its not a natural law.
Understanding sociology as ecology at human scale is core to libertarianism.
Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#505Earlier 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.
The issue is they regulate so
a) you simply can’t buy them - while other countries tried to get n95s and equivalent to everyone the us blocked sale to reserve them.
B) price cap everything which means things like hand sanitizer can’t be bought through normal channels because retailers can price to deter hoarding or incentivize production because it sells out at capped price right away
Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#506Same idea as this game development legend https://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-dev... > he had put aside those two megabytes of memory early in the development cycle. He knew from experience that it was always impossible to cut content down to memory budgets, and that many projects had come close to failing because of it. So now, as a regular practice, he always put aside a nice block of memory to…
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop
My favorite part of that story is how the initial question about overflow should make it obvious that what they're doing doesn't work, but nobody noticed.
Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 think the problem is that you do not need 100% of your budget every year, but getting it back when you do need it is much harder than keeping it in the first place. Definite case of misaligned incentives.
I've never understood this about budgeting. So you allocate. A budget. These are fund YOU ARE PLANNING TO SPEND! So, OK, you DON'T spend them this year. Why the fuck don't you get to SAVE THAT MONEY!? No, instead you are punished for now spending it all and you cannot create a realistic budget for next year - why the hell not!?
Sorry, but this frustrates the hell out of me! What am I missing here? What arcane bit of finance lore leads us down this path? Am I just hopelessly naive? Is acing money such a bad thing!? I just don't get it...
Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#508This approach is not unique to IT.
Some companies are overstaffed for similar reasons
Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminds me of the reserve tank toggle on some motorcycles. When you run out of gas, you switch the toggle and drive directly to a gas station.
The bikes I've had that have had reserve tanks have also been old enough to raise the disconcerting follow-on question, which is: "is the reserve gas also full of sludgey crap that's settled in the tank and hasn't been disturbed really in a year, and am i about to run that through my poor carbs?"
It’s not a separate tank (in any of my bikes at least) so it gets disturbed every time you refill the tank?
Re: All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
#510Simple and beautiful. Thanks for sharing.