[H-GEN] MySQL filling up /

Michael Anthon michael at anthon.net
Tue Jan 6 00:46:29 EST 2004


I've come across an odd situation that I can't fully resolve.  We
noticed today that the root partition on one of our servers was full.
Investigation showed something a bit strange... du was reporting only 5G
used and df was reporting 9G used.  I've never seen such a large
discrepency between these 2 tools before.

In the end [1] I bounced the mysql server and all of a sudden I had 4G
free and df was reporting only 5G used.

A bit more searching showed others having similar problems but no real
definitive answers that I could find.  Mostly there was a recommendation
to set the mysql "tmpdir" to something other than /tmp, which is all
well and good but doesn't really explain what was happening.

The real thing I can't understand is how mysql was able to use up 4G of
space on the disk without me being able to find out where it was doing
it (and yes, tmpdir was set to /tmp and I know how to show hidden files)

Can anyone shed some light on this for me?

Cheers
Michael

[1] after trying lots of things like repeated du's and comparing
results, using "find -ctime -5.." etc etc.




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