how to detect a process which is continuosly eating the disk space

Question

on our linux system (suse), one of the partition is nfs-mounted and some process is continuously eating the disk space in it, leaving behind zero bytes to write. How can I figure out this process or daemon which is eating the disk space? Is there any way like checking in /proc with ps -ef?

Answer 1

You could use lsof to see which processes have which files open. It would be worth looking at the man page for this as the arguments would need to be tweaked depending on how often the files are being written, where they are and how the NFS partition is mounted.

So as an example, to see which processes are using the open files in the /mount/nfs_partition directory and refresh every 2 seconds you would use:

lsof -Nr 2 -- /mount/nfs_partition

Answer 2

atop has a column for this called WRDSK. In your situation I'd install and run it, then hit D to sort processes by disk activity.