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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

#521

Post by fencepost »

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.

Check Target for your Coke fix. Multiple stores in the Chicago burbs list of in stock.

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

#522

Post by herewulf »

kaminar wrote: post #389
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…

Create empty disk partition not possible? Seems easier to manage, no?

I always leave some unallocated space in LVM in my machines. However, in a cloud environment it's probably easier or only possible to delete that 8 GB file.

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

#524

Post by School-Cotton »

Blackthorn wrote: post #506
benhurmarcel wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it an overflow because `int` was typically 16-bit in those days?

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

#525

Post by sillysaurusx »

trissylegs wrote: post #523

I suppose if you have deduplication (eg ZFS) you'd have filter out that file or it'll probably get converted to a sparse file.

dd if=/dev/urandom would do the trick. Filling a file with zeros is as fast as filling it with random data.

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

#526

Post by superjan »

We write a data intensive desktop app, and when you are close to disk full, we reduce functionality so you can’t make the problem worse, or lose work because of the disk full situation. The thing is that we know that more than half of that user’s data is ours, so our data is often the cause.

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

#527

Post by sillysaurusx »

dylan604 wrote: post #182
ghostly_s wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And users have been ignoring that message as long as MacOS has been giving them. Maybe even longer

I even hacked my MacOS to disable the message. Computers shouldn't nag their owners repeatedly, even if it's in their best interest, unless the computer is about to catch fire.

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

#528

Post by sillysaurusx »

whartung wrote: post #106
terramex wrote: post #25

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…

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 system reboot. I was also unable to save any open file, even to external disk and suffered minor data loss every time due to that. This just happened to me. I got the best error message I've ever seen. Something akin to "Can not remove file because the disk is full…

I've been living with this for the past few years. The only remedy is to do a full system reboot. Sometimes I reboot a few times a night.

One way to buy yourself some time is to disable the sleep file. I'm not sure what it's called -- it's a file that MacOS uses to let the computer hibernate when there's no power. It's a few GB, which (like the blog post stated) is a nontrivial amount of freeable space.

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

#529

Post by coldtea »

anonuser123456 wrote: post #446
coldtea wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Capitalism is compatible with Pigouvian taxes.

Yes, just not in practice, as capitalists amassing wealth can then buy legislation that suits them.

We end up with a few token Pigouvian taxes (when they're not ordered by businesses themselves and used to hurt competition).

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

#530

Post by School-Cotton »

layla5alive wrote: post #501

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.

Expanding a mounted partition on a live server sounds dangerous. Does ext4 even allow it?
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