Uh.. How much disk space does Arch need?

farghal · 2008-05-14 21:30:25

Hello everybody.

My / partition is 10GB (and the rest of my 160GB drive is for /home). I have used more than one distro on that partition and I never ran out of disk space. My current Arch install is very recent, and I only installed Gnome and a few other programs (I'm trying to keep it minimal this time around).

However

A couple of days ago I found out that / was completely full!

How did that happen?

Issuing pacman -Scc to clean pacman's cache helped a bit. I now have 362MB free space. Here is the output of pacman -Qet (the packages I explicitly installed) and I hope someone can tell me if this is normal for Arch (I have certainly not seen such behaviour on other distros), or if some process in the background is going crazy and somehow eating up space unnecessarily, or if I did something horribly wrong with the install.

Here is my DAEMONS line in /etc/rc.conf:

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng @network gdm @sshd netfs crond @alsa @hal
@fam @bluetooth @mpd @lastmp @lastfmsubmitd)

Please help.

lucke · 2008-05-14 21:36:03

This topic might help.

farghal · 2008-05-14 21:50:22

Hmm. No. That's not it, unfortunately. His /root was what was occupying the space because its /Trash was big. That's not the case here:

[ahmad@ahmad-desktop ~]$ sudo du -hs /root
144K    /root

However, the thread taught me how to check what the sizes of the folders in my / partition are, and /var seems to be the culprit: Why in the world does /var/log weigh 6.4GB???!

[ahmad@ahmad-desktop ~]$ sudo du -hs /var
6.5G     /var

I have in there a kernel.log that weighs 1GB! and everything.log that is 1.2GB! Who writes these logs and how can I disable that behaviour?

Please help. Thanks.

bender02 · 2008-05-14 22:01:28

These logs are written to by syslog-ng. It's there for a reason - when something doesn't work as it should (errors, warnings), it's logged there. That should be the first place you should be looking for some info when something goes wrong.

In your case, take a look at these logs and see which process generates so much stuff, and then try to fix that.

farghal · 2008-05-14 22:31:58

How can I view the file if it's over a gigabyte of space? Nano, leafpad, and abiword all fail to open them! Are they safe to delete? Heck I'll delete them anyway, and then monitor them afterwards.

By the way what is logrotate? and how can it help me?

Zepp · 2008-05-14 22:31:59

If your logs are huge you should setup log rotation. I'd just use du until you find the trouble makers. or you could use on of those graphical disk usage programs. Anyway my install of arch was ~1GB but that was on a headless box so there was no X, Gnome, etc. Even with though you should have lots of room with 10 GB.

Zepp · 2008-05-14 22:33:44

farghal wrote:

How can I view the file if it's over a gigabyte of space? Nano, leafpad, and abiword all fail to open them! Are they safe to delete? Heck I'll delete them anyway, and then monitor them afterwards.
By the way what is logrotate? and how can it help me?

less/more probably, maybe vi but it will still take awhile.

log rotation basically moves or deletes your logs after they become a certain size or age.

bender02 · 2008-05-14 22:35:59

Logrotate renames logs on specified intervals (eg. kernel.log -> kernel.log.1, kernel.log.1 -> kernel.log.2, ...) and deletes the last one (usually kernel.log.4). That could help.

I think you could try to view them with 'less'; or if that fails then 'tail -n 30 <file>' will give you last 30 lines of <file>.

You can delete the logs, but if you don't find out which process is making them grow, then they'll grow too much again ...

fukawi2 · 2008-05-15 00:50:59

Seems the problem has been found here, but here's a quick one liner I use for debugging excessive disk usage:

for DNAME in $(ls -a) ; do if [ -d "$DNAME" ] ; then du -s "$DNAME" ; fi ; done | sort -n

or for a human readable (and unsorted) version:

for DNAME in $(ls) ; do if [ -d "$DNAME" ] ; then du -hs "$DNAME" ; fi ; done

Arch Linux

#1 2008-05-14 21:30:25

Uh.. How much disk space does Arch need?

#2 2008-05-14 21:36:03

Re: Uh.. How much disk space does Arch need?

#3 2008-05-14 21:50:22

Re: Uh.. How much disk space does Arch need?

#4 2008-05-14 22:01:28

Re: Uh.. How much disk space does Arch need?

#5 2008-05-14 22:31:58

Re: Uh.. How much disk space does Arch need?

#6 2008-05-14 22:31:59

Re: Uh.. How much disk space does Arch need?

#7 2008-05-14 22:33:44

Re: Uh.. How much disk space does Arch need?

#8 2008-05-14 22:35:59

Re: Uh.. How much disk space does Arch need?

#9 2008-05-15 00:50:59

Re: Uh.. How much disk space does Arch need?

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