/proc is eating all my disk space

[gfunk123]

hi

I have an sun ultra 5 running a firewall which has logging enabled (essential). The disk is sliced up with /proc on / (c0t0d0s0). / is sliced at 3 gig. My problem is this, one afternoon, a manager asked me to retrieve some firewall logs, so i went into the relevant directory (also on the / slice) and typed 'ls -l', for some reason the last 6 days logs were empty (0 bytes), so my first instinct was to run 'df -k' to see how much space was left on /, as i thought it was at 100%, so at root i used 'du -sk *' to check what was eating the space, everything was fine apart from /proc which reported 2.6 gig. I delved deeper and indeed found directories ie 156 and 24967 which both came in at nearly a gig each.

Everthing I have read has said that /proc is virtual and these direcotries dont actuall eat any space, but if this is the case how come DF and DU report on it and how come when DF reports 100% on / because of these so called virtual files, It doesnt allow me to write anything to the disk, Ive even tried to create afile on /
using 'touch file' with no joy

Any help on this extremely frustrating matter would be greatly appreciated

regards
Gary

 

[Morsing]

The proc directoy files are actually located in memory. (It is processes mostly).

Don't worry about it, that's not what filled up your /.

Cheers Henrik Morsing
Certified AIX 4.3 Systems Administration
& p690 Technical Support

 

[Annihilannic]

Each of those directories corresponds to a process of the same ID... maybe look for those two processes and find out what they are and what they're doing? Try killing and restarting them (unless they're critical of course) and see if the usage drops? Annihilannic.

 

[mrregan]

Hi,
Just as the other post mentioned, /proc doesnt take any disk space. Try to find some file or files to remove or move to another drive. You can use a command like:
cd /
find . -size +1000000c -print
to find all files bigger than 1 megabyte. Hope this helps.