Syslog file growing to multiple GB / now site won't load at all

Posted on August 9, 2020

I started having trouble a week ago with a Wordpress site suddenly out of space. (My install/files are under 10GB on a 25GB droplet.) I tracked the issue to giant syslog files (3+GB). I deleted those, and the site restarted. Every day, the files fill again and shut down the site. By clearing them out, I’ve been able to get things running, but today, the site won’t come up again at all.

Using tail -n 20 example.log, I can see a repeated error happening that is being logged, but I don’t know what to do or how to begin troubleshooting to clear this up and get my site back.

“File a000280195f0d4 is in wrong format aborting”

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alexdo

August 9, 2020

Hi, @oamyoamy

Have you checked if the web server (Apache/Nginx) is running as well? When the server is running out of disk spaces some services might fail to operate and they will fail and you’ll need to start/restart them once the disk usage is back to normal.

I will recommend you to check what exactly is being logged in the syslog as there might be a bigger issue here which you need to sort out. Deleting/clearing the log all the time or even with a scheduled task/cron job is not an ideal solution.

Also feel free to share any logged errors here in the community.

Hope that this helps! Regards, Alex