Re:All my servers have an 8 GB empty file on disk
by ben509 on Thursday March 25, 2021 @05:15PM
(#26585468)
One argument in favor of it is the 8GB file may cause a runaway process to crash, leaving you without it continuing to chew up space and able to recover.
A second argument is it's not opened by any process. One problem I've had fixing disk full errors was figuring out which process still had a file open.
(For any POSIX noobs: the space occupied by a file is controlled by its inode. Deleting a file "unlinks" the inode from the directory, but an open filehandle counts as a link to that inode. Until all links to the inode are deleted, the OS won't release the space occupied by the file. Particularly with log files, you need to kill any processes that have it open to actually reclaim the disk space.)
A second argument is it's not opened by any process. One problem I've had fixing disk full errors was figuring out which process still had a file open.
(For any POSIX noobs: the space occupied by a file is controlled by its inode. Deleting a file "unlinks" the inode from the directory, but an open filehandle counts as a link to that inode. Until all links to the inode are deleted, the OS won't release the space occupied by the file. Particularly with log files, you need to kill any processes that have it open to actually reclaim the disk space.)