disk full or not? you decide...

disk full or not? you decide...

[Shawn Veader]

hello,
i am not a subscriber to the list but i need the help of anyone
on the list who might have some insite into this problem. please
remember to cc me on your reply. thanks!

we are using reiserfs on a system running 2.4.3 (i think i put all
of the relavant patches into the kernel before i built it then...)
we have a partition that is used when encoding ripped songs and
storing large files such as video and music. we noticed recently
that the partition reported itself as being full. after a reboot
the system reported having 6G freed. now again after a day of use
the space has dissappered. df now returns:
----
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5             706M  229M  477M  32% /
/dev/hda2              55M   36M   19M  65% /boot
/dev/hda7             1.0G   95M  932M   9% /usr/local
/dev/hda8              26G   22G  3.7G  85% /Assets
----
however if you run du on the /Assets dir you get:
----
8.3G    /Assets
----
does anyone know why this is happening? our guess is that the logs
to reiser are getting quite large. how do we flush them and force
a garbage collection? we save and remove several large files on this
partition as the system is running. therefore, i figure that the
space is kept around till the log is flushed in case it is needed for
replaying the journal. am i totaly off?

i would like to upgrade the kernel but we have several third party
dependencies that keep us from doing that on a fast enough pace to
keep up with the 2.4.x series.

thanks again for any help that can be given. remember to cc me in
responces.

-- 
shawn veader        --oOo--      linux os developer
shawn.veader@zapmedia.com | http://www.zapmedia.com

Re: disk full or not? you decide...

[Ragnar Kjørstad]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2001 at 03:30:11PM -0400, Shawn Veader wrote:
> does anyone know why this is happening? our guess is that the logs
> to reiser are getting quite large. how do we flush them and force
> a garbage collection? we save and remove several large files on this
> partition as the system is running. therefore, i figure that the
> space is kept around till the log is flushed in case it is needed for
> replaying the journal. am i totaly off?

No, space should be available right away, and the journal have fixed
size (32 MB pr default)


Most likely the problem is caused by a big file (or more files) beeing
deleted but some program still keeping it open. Then the space can not
be reused until that program closes the file.

You can get a list of deleted files that are still open with:
ls -l /proc/*/fd | grep deleted



-- 
Ragnar Kjorstad
Big Storage

Re: disk full or not? you decide...

[Andreas Dilger]

Shawn Veader writes:
> we are using reiserfs on a system running 2.4.3  we noticed recently
> that the partition reported itself as being full. after a reboot
> the system reported having 6G freed. now again after a day of use
> the space has dissappered.
> ----
> does anyone know why this is happening? our guess is that the logs
> to reiser are getting quite large. how do we flush them and force
> a garbage collection? we save and remove several large files on this
> partition as the system is running. therefore, i figure that the
> space is kept around till the log is flushed in case it is needed for
> replaying the journal. am i totaly off?

The problem is that something is keeping these files open, and the
space cannot be freed until the process exits (or closes the files).
You can use lsof to tell you which files are open, and which process is
using them.  If it is your own code that is causing this problem, you
need to ensure that you close all of the files that you open when you
are done with them.

The reiserfs journal is a fixed size, so it cannot be that.

Note also that on reiserfs, if you have such a process which keeps
files open after they are deleted and then you have a crash, the file
is "orphaned" and the space is "lost" until you run reiserfsck again.
It may be that Chris Mason's patch for this is in the latest kernels,
but it may not be, and it might not be in the kernel you are running.

Cheers, Andreas
-- 
Andreas Dilger  \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto,
                 \  would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?"
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/               -- Dogbert

Re: disk full or not? you decide...

[Aaron Smith]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2001 at 03:30:11PM -0400, Shawn Veader wrote:
> hello,
> i am not a subscriber to the list but i need the help of anyone
> on the list who might have some insite into this problem. please
> remember to cc me on your reply. thanks!
> 
> we are using reiserfs on a system running 2.4.3 (i think i put all
> of the relavant patches into the kernel before i built it then...)
> we have a partition that is used when encoding ripped songs and
> storing large files such as video and music. we noticed recently
> that the partition reported itself as being full. after a reboot
> the system reported having 6G freed. now again after a day of use
> the space has dissappered. df now returns:
> ----
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda5             706M  229M  477M  32% /
> /dev/hda2              55M   36M   19M  65% /boot
> /dev/hda7             1.0G   95M  932M   9% /usr/local
> /dev/hda8              26G   22G  3.7G  85% /Assets
> ----
> however if you run du on the /Assets dir you get:
> ----
> 8.3G    /Assets
> ----
> does anyone know why this is happening? our guess is that the logs
> to reiser are getting quite large. how do we flush them and force
> a garbage collection? we save and remove several large files on this
> partition as the system is running. therefore, i figure that the
> space is kept around till the log is flushed in case it is needed for
> replaying the journal. am i totaly off?
> 
> i would like to upgrade the kernel but we have several third party
> dependencies that keep us from doing that on a fast enough pace to
> keep up with the 2.4.x series.
> 
> thanks again for any help that can be given. remember to cc me in
> responces.
> 
> -- 
> shawn veader        --oOo--      linux os developer
> shawn.veader@zapmedia.com | http://www.zapmedia.com
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/


Try this to see if it is a large file left on the partition:  du -a | sort

I've had a problem similar to that where something spazzed out and wrote about 10 gigs to a log file.  Still haven't figured out what caused that.
-- 
-Aaron

Don't hate yourself in the morning, sleep till noon

Re: disk full or not? you decide...

[Josh McKinney]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 282 bytes --]

On approximately Wed, Jul 11, 2001 at 03:25:58PM -0500, Aaron Smith wrote:
> > however if you run du on the /Assets dir you get:
> > ----
> > 8.3G    /Assets
> > ----
> > does anyone know why this is happening? our guess is that the logs

Check out the FAQ on www.namesys.com, #17.

[-- Attachment #2: Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 232 bytes --]

Re: disk full or not? you decide...

[Rik van Riel]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, Andreas Dilger wrote:

> Note also that on reiserfs, if you have such a process which keeps
> files open after they are deleted and then you have a crash, the file
> is "orphaned" and the space is "lost" until you run reiserfsck again.
> It may be that Chris Mason's patch for this is in the latest kernels,
> but it may not be, and it might not be in the kernel you are running.

Chris, Hans,  is this problem still in the reiserfs
in the current kernel or has it already been fixed ?

If it's still there, is a patch available which can
be considered stable ?

Rik
--
Virtual memory is like a game you can't win;
However, without VM there's truly nothing to lose...

http://www.surriel.com/		http://distro.conectiva.com/

Send all your spam to aardvark@nl.linux.org (spam digging piggy)

Re: disk full or not? you decide...

[Chris Mason]

On Wednesday, July 11, 2001 07:10:27 PM -0300 Rik van Riel
<riel@conectiva.com.br> wrote:

> On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> 
>> Note also that on reiserfs, if you have such a process which keeps
>> files open after they are deleted and then you have a crash, the file
>> is "orphaned" and the space is "lost" until you run reiserfsck again.
>> It may be that Chris Mason's patch for this is in the latest kernels,
>> but it may not be, and it might not be in the kernel you are running.
> 
> Chris, Hans,  is this problem still in the reiserfs
> in the current kernel or has it already been fixed ?

Vladimir Saveliev has a patch that is doing well in internal testing.  I
had wanted to intergrate it some nested transaction stuff, but it didn't
have the same advantages as it did under 2.2.x.

They will probably send it out for wider testing very soon.

Just to clarify, you need to have a crash or unclean un
-chris

Re: disk full or not? you decide...

[Hans Reiser]

Ragnar KjЬrstad wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Jul 11, 2001 at 03:30:11PM -0400, Shawn Veader wrote:
> > does anyone know why this is happening? our guess is that the logs
> > to reiser are getting quite large. how do we flush them and force
> > a garbage collection? we save and remove several large files on this
> > partition as the system is running. therefore, i figure that the
> > space is kept around till the log is flushed in case it is needed for
> > replaying the journal. am i totaly off?
> 
> No, space should be available right away, and the journal have fixed
> size (32 MB pr default)
> 
> Most likely the problem is caused by a big file (or more files) beeing
> deleted but some program still keeping it open. Then the space can not
> be reused until that program closes the file.
> 
> You can get a list of deleted files that are still open with:
> ls -l /proc/*/fd | grep deleted
> 
> --
> Ragnar Kjorstad
> Big Storage
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/
this is probably due to a fixed bug addressed in a not yet released bugfix.

We are about to send it into the ac series (probably Sunday).  If you run fsck it should free up the
space, but run a backup first.

Hans

Re: disk full or not? Disk space dissapear :-(

[Rafael Martinez]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, Shawn Veader wrote:

> Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 15:30:11 -0400
> From: Shawn Veader <shawn.veader@zapmedia.com>
> To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
> Subject: disk full or not?  you decide...
>
> we are using reiserfs on a system running 2.4.3 (i think i put all
> of the relavant patches into the kernel before i built it then...)
> we have a partition that is used when encoding ripped songs and
> storing large files such as video and music. we noticed recently
> that the partition reported itself as being full. after a reboot
> the system reported having 6G freed. now again after a day of use
> the space has dissappered. df now returns:
> ----

I have had det samme problem with 2.4.1, 2.4.3, 2.4.4 but I do not use
reiserfs, just normal ext2.

It does not happen all the time but sometimes when I delete a file bigger
than 2GB, the space used by the file is not freed, This space dissapears
from the system and the only way to get it back is to reboot the machine.

No errors, no problems with the rest of the system, the space just
dissapear.

We use to work with files up to 7-9GB and the only thing I can notice when
this happens is that the time it takes to erase the file is very, very
short (under a second) when the space dissapear and it takes a few seconds
to erase a file of this size when everything works OK.

Any ideas?

Sincerely
Rafael Martinez.