Oversized auxiliary file systems in Dapper; why?

Daniel Pittman daniel at rimspace.net
Wed Dec 6 10:16:56 UTC 2006


Urtzi Jauregi <urtzi at fmf.uni-lj.si> writes:

> Hello everybody,
>
> When I want to check the available space on my hard disk, I get the 
> following:
>
> urtzi at escher:~$ df -h
> Filesystem            Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda1             5.0G  3.5G  1.3G  74% /
> varrun                248M   88K  248M   1% /var/run
> varlock               248M  4.0K  248M   1% /var/lock
> udev                  248M  140K  248M   1% /dev
> devshm                248M     0  248M   0% /dev/shm

> I am quite surprised by the four 248-MB filesystems. I have checked
> quite often, and these filsystems are never more than 1% full.
>
> How can I tweak the system to remove or make them smaller (I mean,
> does udev need 250 MB to work at all?)? Do I actually need all of
> them?

Yes, you need them, and you should just leave them alone, because...

> If it has to be like that, I'd like to know how do I get in exchange
> for losing a whole GB of disk space! ;-)

...you have not lost anything at all.

Those are all memory and swap backed file systems, used to hold data
that is useless after a reboot.  The "size" is the maximum memory that
can be allocated on them, and they really only use the memory they show
as "Used."

So, in this case you have around 229K of memory (and/or swap) used to
provide these scratch areas and system management tools.

Regards,
        Daniel
-- 
Digital Infrastructure Solutions -- making IT simple, stable and secure
Phone: 0401 155 707        email: contact at digital-infrastructure.com.au
                 http://digital-infrastructure.com.au/





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