Will disk space increasing wihtout shuting down?

Hallo,
I am running OpenSUSE 11.4, and have 2 partition in it, one is / (about 10GB), another one is /home (about 50GB). I usually put into sleep when I’m away from my computer. It had been few days I never shut down my computer, and today I got a warning message mention that my disk space (/home partition) is full. I check my disk space in Dolphin’s properties menu for the /home directory, found out that it only used up 10GB disk space. I did a check on the “My Computer” on the desktop, the status is showing full usage (100%) in red color. I did df -h command, the partition for the /home is showing 100% used as well. I don’t really know what is going on, and then I restart my PC. It back to normal after I come back to my Linux, which is 10GB disk space used.

I don’t know whether this is a bug in OpenSUSE or not. Can you guys help me out why this is happen? Back to the basic question, can I “sleep” my computer without of shutting down?

THanks @!

I think you are saying that the disk appeared to be nearly full after the machine was in “sleep” state a few days; and it only happened once so far.

I wouldn’t worry yet about that. Some system software misread the disk usage. Probably it was groggy from sleeping (sorry, very bad pun lol). It may never happen again. So continue to use “sleep” and see if the problem recurs. If it does, come back and tell us.

On 03/18/2011 08:36 AM, swerdna wrote:
>
> Probably it was groggy from sleeping (sorry, very bad pun lol).
> It may never happen again.

i love puns…but, i guess something is filling a log instead of
actually “sleeping”…

@huahsin68: what do you mean when you say: “Back to the basic
question, can I “sleep” my computer without of shutting down?”

that is, exactly what are you doing to cause your system to “sleep”?

are you saying you just close the lid? or just turn off the monitor,
or right click the desktop and do what, exactly.

by the way, when sleeping does it snore? (i have been told i do, but i
have never heard it.)


DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[NNTP posted w/openSUSE 11.3, KDE4.5.5, Thunderbird3.1.8, nVidia
173.14.28 3D, Athlon 64 3000+]
“It is far easier to read, understand and follow the instructions than
to undo the problems caused by not.” DD 23 Jan 11

Out of space in /home? Not logging messages somewhere in /home?
Next time maybe you could run


du  -hS --apparent-size  /home   | grep G | less

which would give you a list of files and folders but it will also show any files and folders of gig size, iso, etc.
Like this


345K    /home/tar/.icons/Gion/22x22/mimetypes/SVGs
29K     /home/tar/.icons/Gion/22x22/mimetypes
4.0K    /home/tar/.icons/Gion/2
137M    /home/music/Twelve Girls Band
276M    /home/music/GangaGirl
1.2G    /home/music/OTR/1950s

man du
–apparent-size shows dynamic allocation or sparse files.

On 03/18/2011 11:36 PM, tararpharazon wrote:
>
> Out of space in /home?

nice catch…i just missed that part…

but wait, WHAT would pop up a you are out of space in /home??
i don’t think i’ve ever heard of that one before…


DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[NNTP posted w/openSUSE 11.3, KDE4.5.5, Thunderbird3.1.8, nVidia
173.14.28 3D, Athlon 64 3000+]
“It is far easier to read, understand and follow the instructions than
to undo the problems caused by not.” DD 23 Jan 11

On 2011-03-18 23:41, DenverD wrote:
>
> but wait, WHAT would pop up a you are out of space in /home??

Gnome does it.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)

I never heard of Gnome running away on /home on an idle machine?
May be /tmp filling up / (root) , /var and /srv for servers, .Trash filling up on ~/ but not /home when idle.

On 2011-03-19 17:06, tararpharazon wrote:
>
> robin_listas;2307880 Wrote:
>> On 2011-03-18 23:41, DenverD wrote:
>>>
>>> but wait, WHAT would pop up a you are out of space in /home??
>>
>> Gnome does it.

> I never heard of Gnome running away on /home on an idle machine?
> May be /tmp filling up / (root) , /var and /srv for servers,
> Trash filling up on ~/ but not /home when idle.

You misunderstood.

I said that gnome does put a pop-up saying that you are running out of
space in any partition. I think it is Nautilus.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)

Thank you so much for your reply.

The way I put into sleep is just close the lid. Laptop is just so convenient for me to travel while I am doing my work and I used to do that quite frequently. It has been a few days I never restart my PC.

I did try on du command but it is just so annoying to me.

Anyhow, I have the problem solved. I just restart my PC and then it back to normal. Everything going fine now. I just think that I shouldn’t put my computer into sleep for so long. There must be some temporary files has been created during the sleep time I guess?

THanks @!

On 2011-03-23 08:06, huahsin68 wrote:
>
> Thank you so much for your reply.
>
> The way I put into sleep is just close the lid. Laptop is just so
> convenient for me to travel while I am doing my work and I used to do
> that quite frequently. It has been a few days I never restart my PC.
>
> I did try on du command but it is just so annoying to me.
>
> Anyhow, I have the problem solved. I just restart my PC and then it
> back to normal. Everything going fine now. I just think that I shouldn’t
> put my computer into sleep for so long. There must be some temporary
> files has been created during the sleep time I guess?

No, not that.

Some thing to be aware in linux is that a file can be deleted and still be
in use, opened. The real deletion happens when the program that has it
opened finishes.

For example, when you do an update via zypper or yast, the old libraries
and programs remain in use, and in the disk, if a program is running from
before the update. Thus when you reboot they disappear. It can be detected
with the command “zypper ps”. You can restart all those programs one by
one, or reboot.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)

Not really a workaround IMO common sense. Your idea of sleep turns out to be the same as leaving your machine on 24x7 and that shouldn’t cause a problem.

As I understand you, the problem still exists where some process is increasing your work space. As Robin_listas said there could be programs with undeleted files. You’re not hibernating but actually leaving the system up.

Another consideration is whether you installed tmpwatch which periodically removes junk files from the /tmp folder. An uninstalled tmpwatch would explain a full / (root) directory.

Repeating the DU command could have been helpful if you had saved the output to a file, then reran it a day or more later putting that output to another file and ran a diff to find which files changed and/or were enlarged.

To get the best match you could use some diff options to ignore spaces.
Something like du > a.txt then a few hours later du > b.txt then diff a.txt b.txt | less


###  use the -x to exclude other partitions, 2 partitions / (root) and /home 
su -c  "du -x   /   > a.txt"
su -c  "du -x /home  > ahome.txt"
###   after a few days of closed lid 
su -c "du -x   /   > b.txt"  
su -c  "du -x /home  > bhome.txt"
 ###   run  a  side by side diff 
diff -y --ignore-space-change    a.txt   b.txt | less

Then if there’s a file expanding then you can identify the programs.
If there’s no change or you just haven’t seen the problem without a reboot, then whatever was running before is no longer running.

Good luck.