Less and less free disk space in /

[zhangyou]

I am not sure if it is a normal thing in PCLOS. My root partition's free disk space is getting smaller daily. I notice that every a few days around 100MB free space is gone. I already have /tmp in RAM, a separate partition for /home, and do Bleachbit cleanup daily both in normal and root user.

Is it also partly due to that I perform system update in Synaptic almost every day?

About a month ago I have around 6.7GB free space in / (13GB in total), now it is only 5.0GB. When I reboot after a few days' use, it would usually go up 100MB.

I checked the folders in / one by one for their size, and found that the largest is /usr, which accounts about 4.2GB. then there is /var 1.5GB, /proc 1GB, /opt 850MB

Maybe I should not worry about this

[menotu]

How do you have Synaptic set for post install?  

Is it to keep downloaded rpm's or to delete them?

You could try something like this from a Konsole (as root)

du -s -h /usr/*

The above will show size of each folder under usr

du -s -h /var/*

The above will show size of each folder under var

If you run them daily and note the sizes you'll be able to see which folders are increasing in size. (you can modify the commands for any folders you want to check)

Edit:

If you wanted you could pipe the results to a text file by doing

du -s -h /usr/* > usr-size

The above will list the folder sizes in a document named usr-size and will be in your /home folder  (again modify filename etc to suit)

[zhangyou]

How do you have Synaptic set for post install?  

Is it to keep downloaded rpm's or to delete them?

You could try something like this from a Konsole (as root)

du -s -h /usr/*

The above will show size of each folder under usr

du -s -h /var/*

The above will show size of each folder under var

If you run them daily and note the sizes you'll be able to see which folders are increasing in size. (you can modify the commands for any folders you want to check)

Edit:

If you wanted you could pipe the results to a text file by doing

du -s -h /usr/* > usr-size

The above will list the folder sizes in a document named usr-size and will be in your /home folder  (again modify filename etc to suit)

Hi thanks for your information.
I tried using

du --max-depth=1 -h | sort -n

in /usr
and the results are:

1.7G    ./lib
2.1M    ./lib32
2.3G    ./share
4.5G    .
12K     ./etc
16K     ./X11R6
34M     ./games
35M     ./include
43M     ./local
55M     ./sbin
65M     ./src
152K    ./libexec
390M    ./bin
808K    ./uclibc

in /var, it is as below:

1.4G    ./log
1.6G    .
4.0K    ./empty
4.0K    ./games
4.0K    ./local
4.0K    ./nis
4.0K    ./opt
4.0K    ./preserve
4.0K    ./yp
12K     ./lock
50M     ./cache
123M    ./lib
124K    ./spool
296K    ./run
644K    ./db

in /var/log, I notice these three files are much bigger than others:
user.log
messages
syslog

the three together use 1.3GB space. is it normal?

[menotu]

That does seem big.

Mine currently shows:

user.log = 401.1K
messages = 392.4K
syslog = 482.5K

[zhangyou]

That does seem big.

Mine currently shows:

user.log = 401.1K
messages = 392.4K
syslog = 482.5K

mine:
user.log = 449.6M
messages = 452.3M
syslog = 456.7M

[zhangyou]

What can I do with them? Can they be removed? Or I have to just leave them there?

[Neal ManBear]

You can open them as root and clear the contents.

[zhangyou]

You can open them as root and clear the contents.

Thank you all for your help.
I used

echo "" > /var/log/syslog
...

to clear these files. Now they are only less than 200KB each.
If they get too big in the future, I think I can just clear them again.  

[zhangyou]

I cleared these files, but later I find that their sizes are still growing very fast.
Now they are almost 40MB already.
I am afraid after a few days I will have to clear them again.
Is there a way to stop they from growing this fast?

[kjpetrie]

Logs growing abnormally fast usually indicates errors or warnings about a problem being logged frequently. Are there any messages in these logs which are filling them up. Maybe there is something wrong which is causing excessive logging and ought to be fixed.

[zhangyou]

I remember about a few weeks ago I started another post asking about some questions regarding making my laptop as a wireless AP

and I was suggested to log some iptables activities by running

iptables -I FORWARD -j LOG

and

tail -n 20 /var/log/syslog

From the output I see a lot of entries of Shorewall

I am not sure if it is a related issue

The other thread is here:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,89626.msg750810.html#msg750810

Now when I open the /var/log/syslog I still see a lot of lines of Shorewall messages.
Maybe I need to stop the IPTABLES logging? How to do that?