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I have a fileserver where df reports 94% of / full. But according to du, much less is used:

# df -h /
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3             270G  240G   17G  94% /
# du -hxs /
124G    /

I read that open but deleted files could be responsible for it but a reboot did not fix this.

This is Linux, ext3.

regards

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marked as duplicate by Chris S Nov 19 '14 at 15:07

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.
    
Combine @TCampbell and @Kyle Brandt's answers - reboot and if that doesn't fix it, boot from a rescue CD and run fsck on the unmounted partition. – Paul Tomblin Aug 21 '09 at 11:49
    
I already rebooted before. Extensive fsck running right now. – Andreas Kuntzagk Aug 21 '09 at 12:08
1  
Ok, after an hour of counting, multiplying allocated blocks with block sizes, counting inodes, the pure truth came out - in my case the huge difference was caused not by a mount, but a hidden .trash folder! It was right under my nose. – user176156 Jun 1 '13 at 14:21
up vote 30 down vote accepted

Ok, found it.

I had a old backup on /mnt/Backup in the same filesystem and then an external drive mounted in that place. So du didn't see the files. So cleaning up this gave me back my disk space.

It probably happened this way: the external drive once was unmounted while the daily backup script run.

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Interesting, didn't think of that. Mounting a fs on a non-empty directory can do funny things... – sleske Aug 21 '09 at 14:20
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Ya, that was one of the ones in the link I gave you. That is called an 'overlay mount'. – Kyle Brandt♦ Aug 21 '09 at 15:13
    
Youre right Kyle. I totally missed that in this long page. – Andreas Kuntzagk Aug 21 '09 at 15:35
    
Andreas, it also doesn't make it that clear, I didn't think of it either. – Kyle Brandt♦ Aug 21 '09 at 17:08
5  
chmod mountpoints to 000, so you get errors from scripts instead of them silently filling your root partition – hop Aug 23 '09 at 0:07
up vote 18 down vote

I don't think you will find a more thorough explanation that then this link for all the reasons it could be off. Some highlights that might help:

  • What is your inode usage, if it is almost at 100% that can mess things up:

    df -i

  • What is your block size? Lots of small files and a large block size could skew it quite a bit.

    sudo tune2fs -l /dev/sda1 | grep 'Block size'

  • Deleted files, you said you investigated this, but to get the total space you could use the following pipeline (I like find instead of lsof just because lsof is a pain to parse):

    sudo find /proc/*/fd -printf "%l\t%s\n" | grep deleted | cut -f2 | (tr '\n' +; echo 0) | bc

However, that is almost 2x off. Run fsck on the partition while it is unmounted to be safe.

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df -i does not report anything unusual, will go the fsck way now. – Andreas Kuntzagk Aug 21 '09 at 11:58
2  
quite many ~blocksize/2 size files can make this problem by filling up entire blocks, creating enormously big unavailable space (in the unavailable part of remaining space in the blocks) so do you store lots of small files there? – asdmin Aug 21 '09 at 12:36
    
How would I find out the number of files with such a size? – Andreas Kuntzagk Aug 21 '09 at 13:51
2  
First you need to find you block size, so if it 4096, You want a file less then 4KB, so find / -size -4k | wc -l – Kyle Brandt♦ Aug 21 '09 at 14:26
1  
Used to fill up volumes with several 100 thousand 3k files... changing filesystem from xfs (on sgi) to reiserfs helped make diskspace more efficient. Not an option for many, but worked for us. – ericslaw Aug 21 '09 at 21:55
up vote 8 down vote

It looks like a case of files being removed while processes still have them open. This disconnect happens because the du command totals up space of files that exist in the file system, while df shows blocks available in the file system. The blocks of an open and deleted file are not freed until that file is closed.

You can find what processes have open but deleted files by examining /proc

find /proc/*/fd -ls | grep deleted
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3  
I already investigated this problem (see original post) btw. you can also get that by lsof| grep deleted – Andreas Kuntzagk Aug 21 '09 at 11:56
    
Good point about lsof, thanks. – TCampbell Aug 21 '09 at 12:13
up vote 8 down vote

The most likely reason in your case is that you have lots of files that are very small (smaller than your block size on the drive). In that case df will report the sum of all used blocks, whereas du will report the actual sum of file sizes.

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df can show you the status of inodes for the disk or partition too which may shed some more light as to whether or not this is your situation - df -i / – DisabledLeopard Aug 21 '09 at 14:41
    
@wolfgangsz Not exactly, unless you use du --apparent. – sourcejedi Jun 1 '13 at 15:19
up vote 6 down vote

I agree that 

lsof +L 1 /home | grep -i deleted

is a good place to start, in my case I notice that I had lots of perl scripts that was running, and keeping a lot of files alive, even though they was supposed to be deleted.

I killed the perl functions, and this made du and df almost identical, case closed.

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up vote 1 down vote

By default, when you format a filesystem with EXT3, 5% of the drive is reserved for root. df accounts for this reserve when it reports what is available, while du shows what is actually in use.

You can view the reserved blocks by running:

tune2fs -l /dev/sda|grep -i reserve

and you will get something like:

Reserved block count:     412825
Reserved GDT blocks:      1022
Reserved blocks uid:      0 (user root)
Reserved blocks gid:      0 (group root)

If you would like to adjust that to a lower percent, you can do so with something like

tune2fs -m 1 /dev/sda

You can reduce it to 0, however since this is your root filesystem I would be wary of doing that. If the filesystem actually filled it may make maintenance tasks required to clean it up difficult.

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1  
That is true, but seems beside the point. The "in use" size reported by du and df differs, and that is independent of reserved blocks. – sleske Aug 21 '09 at 12:52
    
The size of disappeared space is not comparable to 5% – drAlberT Aug 21 '09 at 12:54
    
Yeah, it still doesn't add up, but I figured that was adding to the discrepancies. – Alex Aug 21 '09 at 13:46
    
In my case the size of used space shown by du and df was comparable and there was a lack of 23-24GB. Setting reserved blocks number to 1% freed those 23GB. Thanks! – mkll Sep 21 '16 at 12:12
up vote 0 down vote

Is it possible that perhaps du doesn't add in the size of the directories as well? Still, seems like a HUGE difference though, that can't be responsible for all of it.

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