Low Disk space on “Filesystem root”
I’ve been getting this message more frequently – and I’ve found out why.
It could be
- the system journal file
- snap files in the cache
- stuff in /tmp
You may get this message during installation of a large set of packages. Packages get unpacked into a temporary file – which is deleted afterwards, so you get a temporary hump in usage.
System journal file
There is a “systemd journal file” with content like
Jul 12 15:50:09 colinpaice rtkit-daemon[1385]: Successfully made thread 2682 of process 2540 owned by ‘1000’ RT at priority 10.
Jul 12 16:44:41 colinpaice rtkit-daemon[1385]: Supervising 5 threads of 3 processes of 1 users.
Jul 12 16:45:01 colinpaice CRON[7075]: pam_unix(cron:session): session opened for user root by (uid=0)
Jul 12 16:45:01 colinpaice CRON[7076]: (root) CMD (command -v debian-sa1 > /dev/null && debian-sa1 1 1)
Jul 12 16:45:01 colinpaice CRON[7075]: pam_unix(cron:session): session closed for user root
Jul 12 15:58:32 colinpaice kernel: irq_thread+0xda/0x170
This goes back to when I first installed Ubuntu about 4 years ago, but I think a month’s worth of data would be enough.
You can display the disk space used by using
sudo journalctl –disk-usage
and display the contents of the file using
sudo journalctl -n 50 |less
Note: Without sudo you get the userid’s log size… with sudo you get total log size.
The log file is in /var/log/journal/ and was 1.4 GB in size. The size of this file is controlled by the /etc/systemd/journald.conf configuration file. I edited this file (using sudo gedit /etc/systemd.journald.conf).
- I uncommented SystemMaxFileSize and gave it a value of 500M.
- I uncommented SystemMaxFiles and gave it a value of 10
You can either reboot, or use
service systemd-journald restart
to restart the systemd journal.
Although I set the value to 500M, after the journal was restarted – it had size 100MB!
I think 100MB is plenty big enough, and I get a log of disk space back.
Snap files in the cache
sudo du -hs /var/lib/snapd/cache/
gives you the space used.
I then used
sudo rm -r /var/lib/snapd/cache/
Other rubbish
The disk usage analyser gives you a picture of all the space on a file system. Click on “Show Applications” and select Disk Usage Analyser
ColinPaice 