du and dh give different numbers

[venkman]

when I run df on my machine it shows that 235Mb are in use in /dev/hda6 which is mounted on /var. doing du from /var shows a total use of 85MB on /var . What's causing this discrepancy?

-Venkman

 

[venkman]

Restarting apache seemed to fix the discrepancy. why?

 

[jaymzter]

when /var is showing a large amount, use this command;
find /home -size +1000000c -print
hopefully it will find a particular file causing this. Maybe a log?

 

[venkman]

the problem was that there was no such file, or du would've picked it up, yet df was reporting the size to be so large. it occurred just after I deleted a buch of large file on /var. I'm guessing that df has a cache that reads from and it didn't update the cache... is that the case? or possibly that the memory blocks themselves continued to be reserved for files that no longer existed, but for some reason when I restarted apache, whose executable and data resides on var, the reservations were removed? It's no longer a serious problem, but I'm just curious what caused it in the first place. any ideas?

-venkman