How can I find out why my storage space on Amazon EC2 is full

Question

When I run df -h on my Amazon EC2 server, this is the output:

[ec2-user@ip-XXXX ~]$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/xvda1 25G 25G 0 100% / tmpfs 4.0G 0 4.0G 0% /dev/shm

For some reason, something is eating up my storage space.

I am trying to find all of the big files/folders and this is what I get back:

[ec2-user@ip-XXXX ~]$ sudo du -a / | sort -n -r | head -n 10 993580 / 639296 /usr 237284 /usr/share 217908 /usr/lib 206884 /opt 150236 /opt/app 150232 /opt/app/current 150224 /opt/app/current/[deleted].com 113432 /usr/lib64

How can I find out what's eating my storage space?

Answer 1

Well, I think it's one (or more) logfiles which have grown too large and need to be removed/backupped. I would suggest going after the big files first. To find all files greater than 10 MB (10 MB is a big enough file size, you can choose +1M for 1MB similarly)

sudo find / -type f -size +10M -exec ls -lh {} \;

and now you can identify which ones are causing the trouble and deal with them accordingly.

As for your original du -a / | sort -n -r | head -n 10 command, that won't work since it is sorting by size, and so, all ancestor directories of a large file will go up the pyramid, while the individual file will most probably be missed.

Note: It should be pretty simple to notice the occurrence of similar other log files/binaries in the location of the files you so find, so as a suggestion, do cd into the directory containing the original file to clean up more files of the same kind. You can also iterate with the command for files with sizes greater than 1MB next, and so on.