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Special Forums Hardware Filesystems, Disks and Memory Does unix ever misreport free space? Post 54432 by rhfrommn on Friday 13th of August 2004 10:14:52 AM
Old 08-13-2004
Well, never say never and all, but I think it would be extremely unlikely that Unix would report the free space on a filesystem wrong. The only time I've ever seen that is when somebody has deleted a file but a process had a lock on the file. So some utilities would see that the space was available since the inodes were freed, but others wouldn't since the process still claimed to be using the space. As soon as the process died (or you rebooted if the process was a zombie) they got back in sync.

My guesses as to why you are seeing that problem are (in roughly the order of likelyhood I expect)

1. The utility is using way more disk than you expect while it is running. It could be a case where when the utility is done it cleans up most of the space it used, but while running it doesn't have enough for its temp files and so on.

2. Quotas are in place (agree with ZB on that)

3. If you're using a volume manager like Veritas, some kind of configuration problem means the filesystem is smaller than the volume or something like that, so when you check the device it has room but the filesystem itself has run out of space.

4. The minfree setting. ZB mentioned that too above, but I doubt it is the problem. The reason is, for Solaris which I know best at least, only root can see the actual size. If you are checking space as a normal user it only shows you what is available not including that "padding" from minfree. So when your users check and see free space that means the space is free below the minimum cap and thus that shouldn't be an issue. But if all else fails you could try reducing minfree and see if that helps.

Good luck.
 

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tunefs(1M)                                                System Administration Commands                                                tunefs(1M)

NAME
tunefs - tune an existing UFS file system SYNOPSIS
tunefs [-a maxcontig] [-d rotdelay] [-e maxbpg] [-m minfree] [-o space | time] special | filesystem DESCRIPTION
tunefs is designed to change the dynamic parameters of a file system that affect the layout policies. When using tunefs with filesystem, filesystem must be in /etc/vfstab. The parameters that can be changed are indicated by the options given below. OPTIONS
The following options are supported: -a maxcontig The maximum number of logical blocks, belonging to one file, that is allocated contiguously. The default is calculated as follows: maxcontig = disk drive maximum transfer size / disk block size If the disk drive's maximum transfer size cannot be determined, the default value for maxcontig is calculated from kernel parameters as follows: If maxphys is less than ufs_maxmaxphys, which is 1 Mbyte, then maxcontig is set to maxphys. Otherwise, maxcontig is set to ufs_maxmax- phys. You can set maxcontig to any positive integer value. The actual value will be the lesser of what has been specified and what the hardware supports. -d rotdelay This parameter is obsolete as of the Solaris 10 release. The value is always set to 0, regardless of the input value. -e maxbpg Indicates the maximum number of contiguous logical blocks any single file can allocate from a cylinder group before it is forced to begin allocating blocks from another cylinder group. Typically this value is set to approximately one quarter of the total contiguous logical blocks in a cylinder group. The intent is to prevent any single file from using up all the blocks in a single cylinder group, thus degrading access times for all files subsequently allocated in that cylinder group. The effect of this limit is to cause big files to do long seeks more frequently than if they were allowed to allocate all the blocks in a cylinder group before seeking elsewhere. For file systems with exclusively large files, this parameter should be set higher. -m minfree Specifies the minimum free space threshold, or the percentage of space held back from normal users. This value can be set to 0. How- ever, up to a factor of three in throughput will be lost over the performance obtained at a 10% threshold. Note: If the value is raised above the current usage level, users will be unable to allocate files until enough files have been deleted to get under the higher threshold. -o space|time The file system can either be instructed to try to minimize the time spent allocating blocks, or to try to minimize the space fragmen- tation on the disk. The default is time. Generally, you should optimize for time unless the file system is over 90% full. USAGE
See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of tunefs when encountering files greater than or equal to 2 Gbyte ( 2**31 bytes). ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes: +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Availability |SUNWcsu | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ SEE ALSO
mkfs_ufs(1M), newfs(1M), attributes(5), largefile(5) SunOS 5.10 5 Dec 2003 tunefs(1M)
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