Huge /var directory.

lang2 · 2008-11-05 22:06:21

Hi all,

I was trying to download sth with firefox and it was telling me /tmp was full. So I had a look: my / partition is 19G and it was filled up! It turns out that /var is using 7G~ of space almost entirely by 4 files:

-rw-r----- 1 root log 1.9G 2008-11-04 09:02 /var/log/errors.log
-rw-r----- 1 root log 1.9G 2008-11-05 20:32 /var/log/everything.log
-rw-r----- 1 root log 1.8G 2008-11-05 20:32 /var/log/kernel.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.6G 2008-11-05 22:03 /var/log/slim.log

Any idea why? Can I safely remove them?

pressh · 2008-11-05 22:11:29

lang2 wrote:

Any idea why? Can I safely remove them?

yes you can if you are sure you don't need them anymore. Maybe a good idea to add crond to your daemons which runs logrotate every day by default (if installed of course).

Last edited by pressh (2008-11-05 22:11:47)

phrakture · 2008-11-05 22:30:22

It might also be a good idea to find out why errors.log is so big. Yikes.

And yes, logrotate is made to solve exactly this problem (giant logfiles)

lang2 · 2008-11-06 00:03:33

hmmm. From looking briefly at the errors.log, it looks like it's been written to for at least over a full year (might be multiple years). Suppose it was created when Arch was first installed. Also a lot of duplicated lines that happens within a min. But 2G text file is still amazing. Anyways, I'll be brave and remove them.

logrotate requires a bit training

Thanks,

fukawi2 · 2008-11-06 00:20:39

logrotate comes with some very sane defaults. You should be able to pretty much just do `pacman -S logrotate` and it will do a satisfactory job

kjon · 2008-11-06 00:45:28

unfortunately (but, perhaps it's a feature ) logrotate doesn't come with a 'maximum logsize' preset. You can hose your PC by inserting a wrong burned dvd and 'everything.log' will start growing without roof. My two cents here are to set 'size 20M' (or whatever your prefer) into /etc/logrotate.conf and dump unused logs after 4 o 5 rolls.

fukawi2 · 2008-11-06 02:26:18

4 or 5?

# rotate log files weekly
weekly
# keep 1 year of backlogs
rotate 52

:D:D

Last edited by fukawi2 (2008-11-06 02:26:33)

skymt · 2008-11-06 13:27:27

If you're concerned about space on /var, you'll love this:

compress
compresscmd bzip2
uncompresscmd bunzip2
compressext bz2

Add that to logrotate.conf and your old logs will be bzipped. Remember to install lesspipe for easy viewing. If you're really strapped for space, consider trading tool support for size and upgrade to lzma (from the lzma-utils package).

byte · 2008-11-06 13:45:29

That's a nice reminder for me to take a shot at a sane syslog config. I hate everything.log with a passion.

JGC · 2008-11-06 15:00:33

logrotate is run from cron every night. If you only use your laptop during daytime, cron will never run logrotate and your logs keep filling up.

pressh · 2008-11-06 15:07:04

JGC wrote:

logrotate is run from cron every night. If you only use your laptop during daytime, cron will never run logrotate and your logs keep filling up.

yes but that is easy to change. I wrote a small thing about crond some time ago for the newsletter if someone wonders howto.

Allan · 2008-11-06 15:48:16

Also, look at this script: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=57973

Arch Linux

#1 2008-11-05 22:06:21

Huge /var directory.

#2 2008-11-05 22:11:29

Re: Huge /var directory.

#3 2008-11-05 22:30:22

Re: Huge /var directory.

#4 2008-11-06 00:03:33

Re: Huge /var directory.

#5 2008-11-06 00:20:39

Re: Huge /var directory.

#6 2008-11-06 00:45:28

Re: Huge /var directory.

#7 2008-11-06 02:26:18

Re: Huge /var directory.

#8 2008-11-06 13:27:27

Re: Huge /var directory.

#9 2008-11-06 13:45:29

Re: Huge /var directory.

#10 2008-11-06 15:00:33

Re: Huge /var directory.

#11 2008-11-06 15:07:04

Re: Huge /var directory.

#12 2008-11-06 15:48:16

Re: Huge /var directory.

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