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I have an AWS linux instance with a root drive of 32GB.
I have an EBS mount of 20GB

On my root I ran out of space, so I cleared out some files. However my root drive is still full. I can't find out why because when I look at sizes of the directories using du and ncdu they show the drive should have a lot of space. 

df

I get the following results 

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/xvda1 32894812 31946092 848472 98% / devtmpfs 2017224 60 2017164 1% /dev tmpfs 2025364 0 2025364 0% /dev/shm /dev/xvdh 20511356 4459276 15003504 23% /mnt/ebs

My /dev/xvda1 is still full

After some research I installed a great tool ncdu to display disk space and the results are:

ncdu 1.10 ~ Use the arrow keys to navigate, press ? for help --- / ------------------------------------- 4.2GiB [##########] /mnt 1.5GiB [### ] /var 1.2GiB [## ] /usr 684.9MiB [# ] /opt 464.3MiB [# ] /home 141.7MiB [ ] /lib 53.5MiB [ ] /boot 21.2MiB [ ] /lib64 10.8MiB [ ] /sbin 8.1MiB [ ] /bin 7.1MiB [ ] /etc 2.7MiB [ ] /tmp 60.0KiB [ ] /dev 48.0KiB [ ] /root e 16.0KiB [ ] /lost+found e 4.0KiB [ ] /srv e 4.0KiB [ ] /selinux e 4.0KiB [ ] /media e 4.0KiB [ ] /local . 0.0 B [ ] /proc 0.0 B [ ] /sys 0.0 B [ ] .autofsck

If I du -h my total is 8.3G /

So why would my disk be 95% full when it clearly has a lot of space. Am I missing something to do with the mounts and is there any other tool I can run to find out why it is 95% full?

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What did you delete? If you remove a file that is still in use by a running process (e.g., a daemon), that disk space is only released when the process is shut down/restarted.

For example, if you removed current Apache log files, the space will still be in use until you restart Apache. Similarly for system logs (those in /var/log).

You can either:

  • Restart the process(es) in question (e.g. Apache, syslogd, etc).
  • Restart your system.

Once you do one of the above, you should see more available space.

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  • You are right. After restarting a process that I know I removed some files from the used space has gone to 16% /dev/xvda1 32894812 5133296 27661268 16% / I can see how my process went wrong. I changed the home location of a build server to a different mount and restarted the build server and once I confirmed it was running correctly I deleted the old directory. There must have still been a lock on that directory as the logs still get written there. Commented Jul 26, 2015 at 11:41

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