Friday, May 15, 2015

How can your disk be full when df shows otherwise? "Inode" the answer!

Sorry, I just couldn't resist.  That's probably the only time I'll ever get to use that joke.  I had a situation recently where I had a system that kept giving errors that the root volume was full, yet df -h showed plenty of available space.  After doing a bit of digging, I found that there were hordes of tiny files chewing up inodes far faster than the space on the drive.  Essentially, this would be like filling a file cabinet full of folders with only a post-it note inside each folder.  The majority of the volume of the cabinet would be taken up with folders rather than "data."

I could detail how to diagnose and fix this issue, but someone has already written an excellent blog post on how to do just that.

No space left on device – running out of Inodes

Thanks to Ivan Kuznetsov for taking the time to post his tutorial!