topic Re: disk full ? in Operating System - HP-UX

disk full ?

Gary Yu — Fri, 28 Mar 2003 20:13:52 GMT

Hi all,

In one of our HPUX11.0 servers, I have a home directory which is 8GB, and 'bdf' or 'df' shows it stil has some 0.5GB free space:
/dev/vg00/lvol5 8192000 7587826 584409 93% /home

but dmesg shows the file system is full:
vxfs: mesg 001: vx_nospace - /dev/vg00/lvol5 file system full (8 block extent), same message also shows up in syslog.

why it can't utilize the rest of the file system?

thanks,
Gary

Re: disk full ?

Sridhar Bhaskarla — Fri, 28 Mar 2003 20:17:31 GMT

Hi Gary,

You have 600MB free and what you are seeing is the snapshot of the current usage. The messages in dmesg and syslog might be earlier messages. Those errors might have generated when users try to add more than 600MB of data and then deleted them due to the filesystem full messages.

To verify, try to copy 200MB data into the /home directory while the free space is still at 600MB and see if you get the messages.

-Sri

Re: disk full ?

A. Clay Stephenson — Fri, 28 Mar 2003 20:19:14 GMT

Because you have a process running that still has the file descriptor open. The file has been unlinked (removed from directory) but until all processes which have a file open either close the file or the processes die, the space is not actually freed. You can use lsof or fuser to determine which processes are involved.

Re: disk full ?

Gary Yu — Fri, 28 Mar 2003 20:25:07 GMT

Thanks Sri for the quick respons, actually, it happened all the time, it's one of our dev server, developers are using Samba, when they try to add files (very small one) and they got message said no enough space, and I got the same error from dmesg. But strange thing is, I can create new files (70MB) directly from the server.

Is it something about Samba?

Re: disk full ?

Hai Nguyen_1 — Fri, 28 Mar 2003 20:30:45 GMT

Gary,

You received the message because the filesystem threshold might be set to 90%.
Hai

Re: disk full ?

Sridhar Bhaskarla — Fri, 28 Mar 2003 21:27:37 GMT

Hi Gary,

I have not seen HP-UX generating these messages unless the filesystem is literally at 100% and there are not blocks available to write to. So, the errors that you saw were genuine and the filesystem was at 100% that time.

I would suggst the following. Keep two windows on the server open. In one window do

$while [ true ]
>do
>bdf /home
>done

In the other session

$tail -f /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log

Then let your developers try to write a small file through samba and see what you observe in both the windows.

It may be a samba thing but I don't know much about the internals of samba processes.

-Sri

Re: disk full ?

Nesan — Fri, 28 Mar 2003 21:39:05 GMT

Hi Gary,

Please take a look at the time entry( when File system full - message generated) in the syslog.log file.

bdf and df shows current status.

Some programs ( executed by users )might have generated more than 600 mb temporarily and deleted. Or some programs would have died and deleting temporary file.

Most probably this might be case.

Re: disk full ?

Steven E. Protter — Fri, 28 Mar 2003 22:09:21 GMT

You may have deleted a file, but if the process that created it is still open, the space is still on hold.

fuser -cu /home

kill processes one at a time or with

fuser -cuk /home

SEP