Question

Why does my droplet have a lot of used space?

I have a droplet with 80GB of space, however it reports that it has used 75GB.

/dev/vda1        78G   **75G**  2.8G  97% /

When I use the command du -h --max-depth=1 / I get the following in reply:

274M	/lib
11M	/opt
16K	/lost+found
15M	/bin
76K	/root
15M	/sbin
4.0K	/srv
0	/sys
4.0K	/media
115M	/boot
96K	/tmp
4.0K	/home
du: cannot access '/proc/18546/task/18546/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access '/proc/18546/task/18546/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access '/proc/18546/fd/3': No such file or directory
du: cannot access '/proc/18546/fdinfo/3': No such file or directory
0	/proc
1.4G	/usr
8.0K	/snap
644K	/run
4.0K	/lib64
3.1G	/var
4.0K	/mnt
0	/dev
7.7M	/etc
4.9G	/

It’s only 4.9GB of space.

What could be happening?


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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
November 3, 2021
Accepted Answer

Hello,

In some cases, when deleting a file in Linux, it doesn’t get actually deleted. This could happen when a process is holding the file open, preventing it from being deleted.

The solution would be to either restart the server or kill the process that is holding the file in order to release the disk space.

You could use the lsof command to find which process is causing the problem:

lsof +L1

The above will show you a list of processes that are using a deleted (unlinked) file.

Alternatively you could use the following command:

lsof |grep deleted

Then you could kill that specific process or restart the service associated with the process.

Let me know how it goes. Regards, Bobby

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