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Administering filesystems

Maintaining free space in filesystems

One important responsibility of the system administrator is ensuring that there is adequate disk space for the users. To do this, you must monitor the free space in each filesystem and take corrective action whenever free space gets too low. The amount of free space depends on the size of the disk containing the filesystem and the number of files on the disk. To determine how much free space is available in a filesystem, see ``Displaying filesystem and directory usage statistics''.

A UNIX system operates best when at least 15% of the space in each filesystem is free. If a filesystem has less than 15% free space, system operation typically becomes sluggish.

When a filesystem has little or no space left to work, the system displays the following:



   out of space on device
When the filesystem runs out of space, the system stops any attempts to write to the filesystem. The only way to restore system operation is to delete or reduce files from the named filesystem.

If the free space falls below 15%, you can do any of the following:


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