why diskspace claimed in /var?

[Dennis Handly]

>The REG would mean a regular file but only /var is mentioned without a filename.

If these are the removed files, that may make sense?
I've see other cases where you need to do a find(1) to get the names:
find /var -inum 24115 -o inum 23807

Note the file offset of each is about 18676144.

>We are able to redirect the claim by these processes onto another filesystem.

You can, how? TMPDIR?
That is probably all you can do.

[Roland van Lochem]

Hi TTr / Matti,

my question is limited to these processes:
frmweb 6531 oracle 45u REG 64,0x8 653744 0 8351 /var (/dev/vg00/lvol8)
frmweb 7315 oracle 45u REG 64,0x8 179501488 0 4898 /var (/dev/vg00/lvol8)
frmweb 8297 oracle 45u REG 64,0x8 426944 0 8355 /var (/dev/vg00/lvol8)
frmweb 8422 oracle 45u REG 64,0x8 16222640 0 6451 /var (/dev/vg00/lvol8)

Hi Dennis,

yes, you are right: redefining of TMPDIR is done for redirection.

Part of my question is still unanswered:
Can we limit the claim (how)?

[TTr]

If you removed files while they were in use and in the "open" state, their space was not released.

Two things usually happen, the process is still active and is using the files and is writing to them. You have to stop the process that is holding the files open. Then the files will disappear and the space will be released.
Or, the proces that uses the deleted open file is hung in which case you have to kill the process. Sometimes the process will not listen to any kill signal and the only way to kill the process and reclaim the space is to reboot the server.

[Dennis Handly]

>Can we limit the claim (how)?

Possibly by using TMPDIR to point to a filesystem with quotas. But this may just abort those processes.
Have you found out what's in these files? If they are logs, perhaps you can configure them to not be so verbose?

[Roland van Lochem]

Hi TTr,

please take the time to read James' post in this thread. He gave a very clear explanation of what is happening.

Hi Dennis,

we suspect this space is used by oracle forms processes to manipulate data. For example: they have a button in their form which selects all records on certain criteria and then they can sort on date or whatever. The sorting criteria needs the whole set of records and not just a subset.

The application programmers are going to redesign the forms by making use of temporary tables.

For now we're going to add an extra filesystem and redefine TMPDIR for those frmweb processes.

Thank you all very much for your time and thoughts.

[Roland van Lochem]

Thank you all very much for your time and thoughts