do-release-upgrade eats precious disk space on the VPS

Question

I have an issue (obviously, thats why im posting it here). I have a VPS with a provider which has only 2.5GB of space. Now the said provider only supports Ubuntu LTS templates and not the other ones so the latest one I have is 10.04 LTS which installs and takes only 400MB of space. Now I wanted to update to 11.10

New release 'xxxxxxx' available.
Run 'do-release-upgrade' to upgrade to it.

I got tempted and upgraded it to 11.10 and now I can see that my disk usage (just doing the updates with no actual data on the VPS), my consumption has raised from 400MB something to 1.5GB

Can someone let me know whats the issue? probably some temp files that should not have been there?

Answer 1

I have used du -m --max-depth=1 to find directories that got bloated during an upgrade from 10.04 to 12.04.

My findings:

/var/cache/apt/archives/ - 200M
/var/lib/apt/lists/ - 78M
/var/cache/apt-xapian-index - 78M
/var/cache/apt/*.bin - 40M

You can safely clean up /var/cache/apt/archives/ using rm /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb. I'm not sure how you can safely clean up the other directories.

Answer 2

From the command line, you could try running...

sudo apt-get clean

This will clear the apt package cache.