SUMMARY: Incorrect disk utilization reported by 'df'

From: Christopher Knorr (cknorr@trapsystems.com)
Date: Thu Dec 15 2005 - 17:02:59 EST


PROBLEM: The 'df' command is showing our disks are 99+% used, but
we look at the actual amount of space used (via ls -l) it shows FAR
less.

ANSWER: Our database application deletes files quite often. No problems
were being seen with this -- the delete (ultimately a low-level UNIX
delete) was returning success codes.

HOWEVER, for reasons we don't know yet, the files were open at the time
of the deletion. Using 'lsof' I noticed this. Once we restarted our
application (which did low-level closes on the UNIX files) the 'df'
output got significantly better.

One other note:

HP told us that, when using AdvFS, the vdf command should be used to
show disk utilization, not df. I'm starting to see that this is the
case. vdf seems to be reporting correctly, whereas df, although better,
is not 100% accurate.



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