Server disk claims to be full, but appears not to be

Question

I have no idea how this is supposed to work. I did df -h and got this result.

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vzfs              39G  5.8G   24M 100% /
none                  512M  4.0K  512M   1% /dev

So I have 39GB disk, of which 5.8Gb is used, so that means there is 24MB free?? How is that supposed to work?

I tried scanning for folder that might have many small files in it, but that turned up nothing interesting. And du -h just confirms more or less that only 5.8GB is in use.

I want to work out what is causing this because looking at the graph that munin gives me, disk usage went from 15% to over 100% and then the server restarted. I would like to be able to work out why.

Have a look at this: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/82618/df-command-not-showing-correct-values — Guido Vaccarella, Feb 01 '15 at 11:19

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 01 '15 at 11:27

I guess you are running on a VPS of the OpenVZ type and your hoster overcommited storage space.

In OpenVZ and similar systems, the disk size is shown as the amount of storage you are allowed to use in the host system, but there is not really a dedicated area reserved for you. In this case, it might happen that the hoster promises more storage to all his users than he actually has (e.g. 5 users are allowed to use up to 500G on a 1 TB disk) and hopes they don't use all that space on average.

If they do, a situation like yours happen. Contact your provider.

Server disk claims to be full, but appears not to be

1 Answers1