We can't really help until you tell us what's using the space. Could be databases, could be docker, could be logs.
I use... du -xh --max-depth 2 /var/ | sort -h
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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If you suspect that the issue is journald, you can use the following command to check how much space it is using:
journalctl --disk-usage
Rather than periodically running journalctl --vacuum-size=500 to free up space, you can just limit the journal by adding the following to a new file such as /etc/systemd/journald.conf.d/size.conf:
[Journal]
SystemMaxUse=512M
This will limit the journal from using more than 512MB. That said, if journald is filling up fast, then something is spamming your logs and you could run journalctl -a -f to get a sense of what is being written to your logs.
Install ncdu, then sudo ncdu -x /var it'll tell you what is taking up space, then if you tell us, we can help you identify how to minimize it and keep it low.
You can use du -sh to figure out what's using most of the space. Something along the line of:
sudo -i
du -sh /home /usr /var
du -sh /var/*
du -sh /var/log/*
# etc
If it's one of your log files (likely), you can run something like tail -n 100 /var/log/[culprit] or tail -F /var/log/[culprit] to see what is being flooded in this log file exactly. Then you can try to fix it.
If I had to guess, I'd say it's probably snaps. I've had the same issue and they've slowly been taking up more and more of my space, often with new gnome snaps being installed but the old ones not removed.
Try "snap list" to see what's installed as snap
See what's using the space. This will list any dirs using >100MiB:
sudo du -h -d 5 -t 100M /var
What is the filesystem type? If it's btrfs, maybe it's the snapshots.
I had the same problem on my PC. Journald was spamming PCI errors all the time and the disk was filling up quite quickly. I ended up disabling journald and rsyslogd and the problem was fixed. You can delete the log files, if you find them
and the problem was fixed
Umm...
This is how my friend fixed her check engine light. Just put the official Car Talk electrical tape over it and problem solved.
And the problem was fixed. FIXED. No more error logs.
Are you using docker on BTRFS?
Docker makes use of BTRFS snapshots, but it snapshots the whole volume. That means as other programs delete/rewrite files, the old copies still exist in the snapshot. I've ended up putting /var/lib/docker on it's own filesystem.
20gb for a Linux workstation is embarrassingly tiny in 2023.... Hell it's barely passable for a phone