topic Re: Missing disk space in Operating System - HP-UX

Missing disk space

Francis Noël — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 08:46:56 GMT

Hello all
I am facing a situation where with a file system where the disk space used by files is not the same as the total used space in the filesystem. Here is some output to illustrate this. ( I tried to format as best I could )

lhpdev1(/)# du -ks /cpa3
702813 /cpa3

lhpdev1(/)# df -k /cpa3
/cpa3 (/dev/vg40/lvcpa3) : 3010858 total allocated Kb
918085 free allocated Kb
2092773 used allocated Kb
69 % allocation used

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me that 2 Gb are used, but I have only 700 Mb worth of files.

This filesystem houses some Oracle 9i databases and it is not an option to unmount it right now.

So where do I go from here ? I'd liek to know where the "missing" Gb went :)

Re: Missing disk space

Robert-Jan Goossens_1 — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 08:55:09 GMT

Hi Francis,

If you have lsof installed, try to locate the open files, an application may still have files open while the files are removed.

# lsof /cpa3

Regards,
Robert-Jan

Re: Missing disk space

Pete Randall — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 09:00:20 GMT

This is almost always a case of a file(s) having been deleted while an application still has it open. The bdf command will not report this space as free until the application ends and closes the file(s) in question.

Pete

Re: Missing disk space

Francis Noël — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 10:04:37 GMT

Thank you for your answers

lsof shows a bunch of open files that are all attached to the same oracle process.

I'll have that database restarted later today to release the files.

Re: Missing disk space

Francis Noël — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 14:07:15 GMT

Closed the database, the process that was holding on to the files exited, the space was freed on the filesystem.

All is good, thank you again for you quick and helpful input.