Free space on /

toasty_ghosty · 2009-09-15 07:32:37

Hello

Been using Arch on my laptop for awhile. Just today I noticed that my / has only 2.6GBs free out of 7.2. It seems to be filling up very quickly. I know I have installed quite a bit of programs but none the less. Any way to avoid using up all 7.2GB?

-Ghosty

jasonwryan · 2009-09-15 07:40:35

Clean the package cache: pacman -Scc?

That would be a place to start, but there could be any number of other things going on...

Aprz · 2009-09-15 07:49:23

jasonwryan wrote:

Clean the package cache: pacman -Scc?
That would be a place to start, but there could be any number of other things going on...

Depends on his partition table also. If /var is a separate partition from /(root) then pacman -Scc would be ineffective since it would really only clear /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ and /var/lib/pacman/{core,extra,...}, etc. If your partitions aren't separate, you could dramatically lower that number by creating a new partition for /usr, /var, /tmp, /home, and /boot (well, some of those wouldn't be too effective like /boot and /tmp, but it's generally good practice).

jasonwryan · 2009-09-15 07:53:44

Aprz wrote:

Depends on his partition table also.

Exactly: there are so many potential variables...

toad · 2009-09-15 08:04:59

go to / and do a du --max-depth=1 -h and take it from there.

fukawi2 · 2009-09-15 08:34:25

And post the output of `df -h` if you still want input from us

Last edited by fukawi2 (2009-09-15 08:34:35)

yasen · 2009-09-15 09:24:06

Install xdiskusage Sometimes graphical applications are better for some tasks.

toasty_ghosty · 2009-09-16 06:14:52

Heres the output:

$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 7.3G 4.3G 2.7G 62% /
none 1.9G 208K 1.9G 1% /dev
none 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1 99M 12M 83M 12% /boot
/dev/sda4 139G 550M 131G 1% /home

Allan · 2009-09-16 06:20:09

Well, then a "pacman -Sc" (or "cc" if you do not want to downgrade) would probably get rid of a lot.

fukawi2 · 2009-09-16 06:52:32

It could be valid usage too... I have 5.4gb used and I have separate /var /tmp and /home:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/lvm0-root
                       16G  5.4G   11G  34% /
none                  997M  216K  997M   1% /dev
none                  997M  4.0K  997M   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1              69M   14M   51M  22% /boot
/dev/mapper/lvm0-var   12G  5.5G  6.6G  46% /var
/dev/mapper/crypt-tmp
                      4.0G  4.2M  4.0G   1% /tmp
/dev/mapper/crypt-home
                       32G   24G  9.0G  73% /home
/dev/mapper/lvm0-music
                       12G   11G  1.3G  90% /mnt/music
/dev/mapper/lvm0-disk_images
                       32G   29G  950M  97% /mnt/disk_images
//fbi/fukawi2
                      233G   16G  205G   8% /mnt/Backup

Last edited by fukawi2 (2009-09-16 06:53:22)

toad · 2009-09-16 08:17:06

xdiskusage is great! I wonder whether there is something like that for the command line???

Aprz · 2009-09-16 09:45:38

I would think that pacman -Scc wouldn't clear as much as separating /usr from /(root), but since /var is clearly not a separate partition from /(root), it definitely would clear out some stuff if you don't do it on a regular basis. Judging from the size of /home partition, you still have A LOT of porn to download before you fill it up. If I were you, I would play flip flop. Copy/move everything from /home to somewhere in your /(root) partition, bootup a LiveCD (before or after you copy /home, doesn't matter), recreate your /home partition to be much smaller. Create a /usr parition, move everything from /usr in your /(root) partition to the new, improved, and separate /usr partition. If you feel you must, but I feel it would redundant to do so, you can save everything on your /(root) partition somewhere else and recreate it to be a larger size, but this would be extremely messy, time consuming, etc...

Depending on what filesystem you are using on each partition (you can check looking in /etc/fstab obviously or df -T if you forgot) some filesystems have a resize option too, but that's out of my league right now (never resized a partition using it's filesystem cause the filesystems I use don't have those options, haha). You'll have to do a search on your filesystems' features and how to use them.

SoleSoul · 2009-09-16 12:21:23

ncdu is a great ncurses disk usage analyzer.
It doesn't draw rectangles or circles but it gives you the list of files/folders in the current folder and their sizes so you can easily see where all the GB went

Mr.Elendig · 2009-09-16 13:47:59

Checking /var/log is usually a good idea, it's not uncommon to have apps spam the logs with 4gb of data...

doorknob60 · 2009-09-16 21:48:56

Oh that's nothing, I had to increase the size of mine because it kept running out (it was like 12 GB or something). I install so much crap though, and have an Arch32 chroot, but still. What kinds of things have you installed. Also, pacman -Scc can do a lot

Last edited by doorknob60 (2009-09-16 21:49:15)

Anikom15 · 2009-09-16 22:09:08

Why is your /home so freakin' huge? It's larger than my entire harddrive!

fukawi2 · 2009-09-16 22:18:12

Anikom15 wrote:

Why is your /home so freakin' huge? It's larger than my entire harddrive!

Some of us need that much space?

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vgData-home
                      200G  131G   70G  66% /home

Perhaps not the OP at the moment, but maybe he/she has plans...?

sand_man · 2009-09-16 22:57:01

Anikom15 wrote:

Why is your /home so freakin' huge? It's larger than my entire harddrive!

Usually I allocated each partition what it needs (/ /var /tmp /boot) and allocate the rest to /home
Where else would you put it?

Aprz · 2009-09-16 23:54:25

The following I am writing will contain some ideas that may not be entirely true or true at all. Don't hate me! D:

sand_man wrote:

Anikom15 wrote:
Why is your /home so freakin' huge? It's larger than my entire harddrive!
Usually I allocated each partition what it needs (/ /var /tmp /boot) and allocate the rest to /home
Where else would you put it?

Heh, you don't have to use your entire hard drive. For moments like these, it's more convenient to have available unused space on your hard drive.

Don't quote me on this, I am not expert, no benchmarks, etc...., but I think keeping your partitions compact to the approximate size you need (and slightly bigger just as fallback case you use more than needed at a certain moment) will mean less movement in the hard drive since the data is not as spread out and hopefully speed up your computer a little, but insignificantly, lol.

Perhaps since the data is also really close to each other, not only do you have less movement in the hard drive, but also caching is more effective since data close to each other are often similar (did read that, called locality principle - look at partitions too, the data inside of them are usually very similar such as /etc containing a lot of text files for configuration, /tmp being temporary junk files, /home often being audio, graphical, and office related data for personal use, etc....) so when you partition, you're not only choosing the optimal filesystem for it, but optimal size for caching (or at least I would think... again, not an expert).

And to be even more off topic for folks who are reading this and think having a good partition table is useless, while my thoughts above may be shaky, I know for certain that keeping your data quarantined is a good idea for stability and security sake (quarantine anything malicious activity even if unintentional such as some really lame inifite loop that constantly creates a new temporary file that fills up your entire paritition every nanosecond) and then when you're reinstalling or fixing something, you don't heve to lose everything). So even if I am completely wrong about above, a good partition table is still a good idea .

I have my doubts and probably over thinking, but I just thought of that awhile back when partitioning and always stuck to it even though I have no evidence of it, no research, etc... Somebody can disprove it or prove it for me, lol.

Last edited by Aprz (2009-09-17 00:07:13)

Anikom15 · 2009-09-18 00:00:45

sand_man wrote:

Anikom15 wrote:
...
Usually I allocated each partition what it needs (/ /var /tmp /boot) and allocate the rest to /home
Where else would you put it?

FreeDOS, Minix, Plan 9, unallocated, or put some in / and /usr.

skottish · 2009-09-18 04:09:09

Moved to a better home.

toasty_ghosty · 2009-09-18 05:25:32

Anikom15 wrote:

Why is your /home so freakin' huge? It's larger than my entire harddrive!

This laptop is near new. Give me a couple more weeks and my /home will be near full..

-Ghosty

sand_man · 2009-09-18 06:08:15

Anikom15 wrote:

sand_man wrote:
Anikom15 wrote:
...
Usually I allocated each partition what it needs (/ /var /tmp /boot) and allocate the rest to /home
Where else would you put it?
FreeDOS, Minix, Plan 9, unallocated, or put some in / and /usr.

Oh yes I know. FreeBSD also requires a large amount allocated to /usr but I'm talking about Arch

Hazor · 2009-09-18 19:31:15

Aprz wrote:

Perhaps since the data is also really close to each other, not only do you have less movement in the hard drive, but also caching is more effective since data close to each other are often similar (did read that, called locality principle - look at partitions too, the data inside of them are usually very similar such as /etc containing a lot of text files for configuration, /tmp being temporary junk files, /home often being audio, graphical, and office related data for personal use, etc....) so when you partition, you're not only choosing the optimal filesystem for it, but optimal size for caching (or at least I would think... again, not an expert).

Not an expert either, but I can tell you that the less free space you have, the more fragmentation you'll get, which can drastically reduce performance. Sure, most file systems you'll use for Linux manage fragmentation fairly well, but with limited space it can only do so much.

As for the rest of it, I don't know, but I don't think the disk knows the difference between a bit from a text file and a byte from a binary.

/dev/sda5 20G 7.4G 12G 40% /
/dev/sda1 298G 134G 159G 46% /home

Anikom15 · 2009-09-18 20:07:33

toasty_ghosty wrote:

Anikom15 wrote:
Why is your /home so freakin' huge? It's larger than my entire harddrive!
This laptop is near new. Give me a couple more weeks and my /home will be near full..
-Ghosty

I curious as to what you fill it with. There's this tool called GNU Zip, it's pretty useful.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-09-15 07:32:37

Free space on /

#2 2009-09-15 07:40:35

Re: Free space on /

#3 2009-09-15 07:49:23

Re: Free space on /

#4 2009-09-15 07:53:44

Re: Free space on /

#5 2009-09-15 08:04:59

Re: Free space on /

#6 2009-09-15 08:34:25

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#7 2009-09-15 09:24:06

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#8 2009-09-16 06:14:52

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#9 2009-09-16 06:20:09

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