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All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk

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

#581

Post by littlestymaar »

devnonymous wrote: post #553
herbcso wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is about opportunity costs. The budget you did not spend could have been spent elsewhere in the meantime and since it didn't get invested elsewhere, it's not a savings, that's a net loss, because of course anything less than 100% utilisation of 100% of "resources", 100% of the time is a loss .. Or some such.

That's probably because of this kind of reasoning that people just throw away money threw windows, because “gotta get rid of it all”.

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

#583

Post by Gravityloss »

osrec wrote: post #406
njovin wrote: post #335

Earlier 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…

Reminds me of this episode of The office: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Surplus

Office always had such a weird version of what happens in an"office". Having a secretary who people ask to take photocopies?

Sounds like the eighties!

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

#584

Post by Yizahi »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #268
Yizahi wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen Linux systems simply crash when root partition was 100% full, though it was an embedded system, not representative to a big servers.

Define crash of a "system"? Kernel panic? some user process you deem essential stopping?

One of essential services crashed and then whole unit rebooted automatically. I don't remember details now since it was a year ago, but that's approximately what has happened. Again, that's not a regular x86 fat server with linux, but embedded arm device running barebones debian plus some custom software, so it may behave differently.

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

#585

Post by throwinreturn »

ycombinete wrote: post #518
eevilspock wrote: post #447

Earlier 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…

It’s not just libertarians. I’m sure that even communists accept the premise of human self interest, but instead of private property their solution is for one all powerful government to own everything

TIL: Kropotkin was not a communist. Nestor Makhno, Errico Malatesta, Jose Durruti? Not communists either. Who'd have thought?

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

#586

Post by CaptainZapp »

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…

Why single out government agencies?

That's the way in every major corporation I ever worked for too.

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

#588

Post by michael-ax »

tored wrote: post #395
scottlamb wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I had zero problems without swap-files for a long time, thinking that 16gb was a lot of ram, and that i could manage. it wasn't and i couldn't.

Now I run two swap partitions the size of physical memory on all machines. Turns out that after some weeks a good third of allocated ram lives in swap proving its usefulness .. and that its quick to turn the aux-swap partition into one for lvm snapshots and i suppose to act as part of the set to emulate'baloon files' too.

tl;dr; bad defaults. go with the size of physical ram and get suspend/hibernate/hybrid working and tested too.

use a 2nd ram-sized partition for snapshots/lvm and emergency space/lvm|zfs.

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

#589

Post by eevilspock »

nickpp wrote: post #577
eevilspock wrote: post #447

Earlier 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…

> we need to get beyond such limited thinking. We need to transcend our base natures Refusing to accept the human nature as-is and always requiring some sort of "evolved new man" is one of the characteristics of the communist/socialist ideology. Also a handy excuse when the system inevitably fails: it wasn't the system, it was the selfish people who did not implement it correctly.

Ahhh the old "socialism/communism inevitably fails" meme.

Let's assume one could even call those failures communism/socialism.[1] How long have we experimented with and developed socialism/communism? 100 years.

How long have we been trying to get democracy right? 2,500 years. With many starts, fits and failures, devolving into dictatorships many, many times. The self-proclaimed "greatest democracy in history" is guilty of genocide and slavery. Even today how much it is a democracy as opposed to an oligarchy/kleptocracy/plutocracy is questionable.

How about capitalism? 500-800 years. And in that time it has exploited, enslaved and murdered people, pillaged entire nations and continents[2], raped the environment, and poisoned every culture that has adopted it with the notion that "selfishness is a virtue".[3]

The only reason capitalism hasn't collapsed (yet) is because capitalists are smart enough to not do pure capitalism, knowing that it would lead quickly to revolution, and because the environment's revolt is just getting started.

---

[1] “The west called [the Soviet Union] Socialism in order to defame Socialism by associating it with this miserable tyranny; the Soviet Union called it Socialism to benefit from the moral appeal that true Socialism had among large parts of the general world population.” ~ Chomsky

[2] The United States: "look how many people died in the Soviet Union's industrialization program!"

Socialists: "how did the United States industrialize again?

The United States: "look, you need to do a BIT of genocide and slavery to kick things off…" ~ Existential Comics

[3] One of the most beneficial things about immersing yourself in deep study of American history is that you get to a point where this country can no longer effectively lie to you about why it is the way it is. It disabuses you of the notion that the inequality we see is an accident. ~ Clint Smith

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

#590

Post by neop1x »

scottlamb wrote: post #346
MayeulC wrote: post #250

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…

>> It's not just me who runs without it; Google production machines did for many years.

But then you need other mechanisms monitoring "out of memory" situations. For example Kubernetes also require nodes to have swap disabled. But running workloads should have resource request/limits defined and then kubelet config specifies minimums on free disk and RAM memory. If there is not emough RAM, workloads are evicted to another worker node with more free memory automatically.

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