New Itanium Server with HP-UX11.23 rm and mv does not release space

[Andrew Young_2]

Hi.

I have just installed my first rx2620 with HP-UX 11.23. I was copying large software depots (350-550Mb) onto the server and when I moved them between filesystems I noticed that bdf reports the space is still used. This happens after either a mv or an rm. These filesystems (both vxfs) were on seperate lvols. It made no difference whether the filesystems were mirrored or not. I ran fuser and there were no process accessing the filesystems. umount and then mount on the filesystems cleared the space. Copying data > 100% of the reported free space also reset the bdf value.

Just want to know if I have done something wrong? I can't figure it out.

Regards

AndrewY

[Ivan Ferreira]

This could be normal behaviour on Unix machines. If a process has a file open for use, the file will be removed, but the space it occupies will remain in place until all processes referencing it are closed.

Use the "fuser" command before deleting files.

Try just copying and deleting files instead of creating a depot.

[Andrew Young_2]

I did check with fuser and there were no processes accessing the disk.

I did try a sync too, although that shouldn't be necessary, but I thought it might resolve it if it had been a buffering issue.

du reports the correct utilisation.

These files were installation images for Oracle 9i but what they are is not relevant to this problem

[Steve Steel]

Hi

I suspect the oracle is the reason.

The space is reserved to be reused by oracle unless it is needed by something else

remains cached

Steve Steel

[Hemmetter]

Hi Andrew

try
lsof +L1 | grep VREG

This will show you file with a link count less than one, i.e. "deleted" file.

This files are removed from directory but remain allocated on disk while one ore more processes still have a handle open on that file. lsof will show you some lines with no filename in the last column but a lvol.

You have to end the processes holding that space.

rgds
HGH

[Andrew Young_2]

Not the files.. They were flat files which I would need in order to install oracle. I had just ftp'd them onto the server, but I did not have sufficient space in /home so I moved them to /scratch which I created.

[Robert-Jan Goossens_1]

Could be fuser did not find open files, I use lsof which I think is a better tool to search for open files.

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Sysadmin/lsof-4.75/

Best regards,
Robert-Jan

[Andrew Young_2]

Looks like this could have been a shell issue. I closed my ssh session and reopened it and the symptoms are no longer occurring.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

Oh and on that lsof port I got SETUID anf GUID errors.

[Andrew Young_2]

Looks like a shell caching problem.