/var is lack of space!!

[John]

On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 06:27:11PM +0800, heccj wrote:
> 
> My box has Apahce,PureFtp,MySql services, it's hardware:128M memory,
> i386 FSB 800Mhz,18G SCSI disk,FreeBSD 5.3.It's slice:
> /	256M
> /swap	256M
> /tmp	256M
> /var	300M
> /usr	others
> After installation,the useage is about 20%.But after few days,
> it increases 50%,so i moved the http and ftp logs,mysql data to another
> slice,but after several days it increases to 70%,now almost 90%.Perhaps
> my box will crash serveral days.I checked the /var/log,it only use about
> 20M,/var/tmp only 100k.So who and where used the space?How should I do?
> 
> thanks every one,itis the first time i use freebsd's mailist.

This is a good way to find out "where" the storage is being used:
cd /var ; du -s * | sort -nr | more
That will give you a list, sorted from most storage to least, of
each directory (or file) at the /var level.  You can then choose
to descend into one of those, and run the command again, to drill
deeper.

This is slightly manual, but I find it helpful to stop and think
at each level what it is telling me and what it means.
-- 

John Lind
john at starfire.MN.ORG