0

I've noticed several posts about this same topic, but found no reasonable solution. This post suggests deleting the files, but I want to avoid that since I'm using apache and that same post says that it will break apache. I ran

sudo du -h --max-depth=1

this is the result I get

du: cannot access './run/user/1000/gvfs': Permission denied
du: cannot access './run/user/121/gvfs': Permission denied
2.3M    ./run
du: cannot access './tmp/.mount_jetbraP4UBzE': Permission denied
104K    ./tmp
6.5M    ./libx32
16K ./lost+found
15M ./sbin
5.7G    ./usr
4.0K    ./cdrom
16M ./etc
0   ./sys
0   ./dev
618G    ./var
13M ./bin
4.0K    ./lib64
195G    ./home
4.0K    ./srv
5.8M    ./lib32
936K    ./root
277M    ./boot
1.2G    ./lib
du: cannot read directory './proc/2824/task/2824/net': Invalid argument
du: cannot read directory './proc/2824/net': Invalid argument
du: cannot read directory './proc/2825/task/2825/net': Invalid argument
du: cannot read directory './proc/2825/net': Invalid argument
du: cannot access './proc/5070/task/5070/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access './proc/5070/task/5070/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access './proc/5070/fd/3': No such file or directory
du: cannot access './proc/5070/fdinfo/3': No such file or directory
0   ./proc
7.3G    ./snap
14G ./opt
7.1T    ./media
4.0K    ./mnt
7.9T    .

so then I went to /var and

/var$ sudo du -h --max-depth=1
142M    ./cache
60K ./tmp
2.3G    ./www
92K ./spool
6.4M    ./backups
4.0K    ./crash
4.0K    ./mail
4.0K    ./metrics
612G    ./log
3.2G    ./lib
4.0K    ./local
228K    ./snap
4.0K    ./opt
617G    .

so than I tried /var/log

/var/log$ sudo du -h --max-depth=1
208K    ./apt
68K ./cups
24K ./samba
4.0G    ./journal
40K ./mysql
8.0K    ./hp
4.0K    ./gdm3
506M    ./nordvpn
4.0K    ./dist-upgrade
20K ./libvirt
92K ./apache2
28K ./unattended-upgrades
2.7M    ./installer
4.0K    ./speech-dispatcher
612G    .

edit: by request here it is

/var/log$ sudo du -xh -d 3 /var/ | sort -h -r | egrep -v '*K|*M'
617G    /var/
612G    /var/log
4.0G    /var/log/journal/1e5573225229470a9199ad4e005b6533
4.0G    /var/log/journal
3.2G    /var/lib
2.5G    /var/lib/snapd
2.3G    /var/www
2.2G    /var/www/pixel
1.3G    /var/lib/snapd/snaps

Now I'm stuck. I have the same problem when I open Disk Usage Analyzer.

enter image description here

How can I free up space on the system? Is this a false positive? In other words it seems like it's reading the free space as used space. Is this a bug?

5
  • 1
    4.3GB is an enormous and unusual logfile. See man journalctl for how to read the log. Clearly, your system is shouting at you (via the log) that there are problems you must fix.
    – user535733
    Mar 12, 2020 at 18:32
  • 1
    Look at all your files in the /var/log folder as well. It shows only 4.3GB in the .journal as 59 items, but you appear to have more files outside of that folder adding up to the other 608GB. There might be many .gz files in there.
    – Terrance
    Mar 12, 2020 at 18:45
  • sudo du -xh -d 3 /var/ | sort -h -r | egrep -v '*K|*M' please.
    – nobody
    Mar 12, 2020 at 20:03
  • @Terrance I found the file that's eating up all the memory it's the /var/log/syslog file. It's using 643 GB. Is it safe to delete this thing?
    – Pachuca
    Mar 13, 2020 at 4:09
  • You can delete any log file. I would peer into it like tail on the file or something to see why. If you delete it and it starts growing again, before it gets too large try to see what is writing to it so rapidly.
    – Terrance
    Mar 13, 2020 at 4:13

1 Answer 1

0

Found a possible solution here, but I wasn't able to determine what was causing this infinite error message to show up. I'm not sure how this will affect my system going forward because I don't see anything going into the log file anymore.

To fix this I had to do

sudo su

because regular sudo gave a Permission denied message. As root I used the solution linked above.

cat /dev/null > /var/log/syslog.1

now my /var/log/syslog.1 is showing as 0 bytes.

Thank you for the help to everyone.

2
  • 2
    This isn't a solution. You have to look into WHY the system is logging so much data. Do a tail on the file and find the real problem - and fix it.
    – Soren A
    Mar 13, 2020 at 6:00
  • This is a work around, and I haven't found a solution because the message I was receiving was due to a bug in vpn software that needs to be patched by the developer. Nothing I can do to fix it on my end except this work around.
    – Pachuca
    Mar 25, 2020 at 15:59

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .