Question Disk space mysteriously growing

[cosmocanuck]

Server operating system version

CentOS Linux 7.9.2009

Plesk version and microupdate number

Plesk Obsidian 18.0.64 Update #1

Hi. I monitor Plesk for updates and disk usage for a client. I've solved issues in the past but am not a hosting management expert by any means, so I hope someone can advise.

Disk usage has broken from its usual pattern, as seen in monitoring, and is closing in on our limit:



As you can see, there's 2 shallow waves, which is the standard pattern due to rolling backups of our three sites via their own WordPress plugins, but then in late September, it keeps going up. Then a sudden ~3GB jump overnight on Oct 26.

I know I can use the Diskspace Usage Viewer to find large directories, but that doesn't tell me when these growth spurts happened or where.

And what can I safely delete? The last thing I want to do is remove something important.

Clearly something new is happening somewhere, as we haven't changed or added anything to our sites.

What is best practice for troubleshooting something like this? I'm quite alarmed but don't know what to do next. And the last time we hit our limit, all sites went down.

Sincerest thanks for any direction / guidance you can provide!

 

[Sebahat.hadzhi]

Hello, @cosmocanuck. What I can suggest is to try the find command and search for recent large files. For example, you can use:

find . -type f -mtime -1 -printf "%p %s\n" | sort -k2nr | head -10

to search for the 10 largest files for the past day. You can adjust the timeframe through the -mtime parameter. If you noticed the peak on the 26th of October, you can try searching for the past 8-9 days or so. I hope that helps.

 

[cosmocanuck]

Hello, @cosmocanuck. What I can suggest is to try the find command and search for recent large files. For example, you can use:



to search for the 10 largest files for the past day. You can adjust the timeframe through the -mtime parameter. If you noticed the peak on the 26th of October, you can try searching for the past 8-9 days or so. I hope that helps.

Thanks for this, Sebahat! I will give it a try.

 

[cosmocanuck]

Hi @Sebahat.hadzhi ! Just to confirm how I'd use the find command to solve this: since I want to determine what file(s) are responsible for that overnight rise in disk usage on a specific date, I'd do a find and set the mtime parameter to take me to the day before the jump (say, -11 or -12 if if it happened 10 days ago), and then do another find with it set to -10 or even -9, and compare the results? With the 2nd search presumably showing the new large files.

What if it's a bunch of small files? Can I search for any directory that grew by, say, 2 GB or more?

Thanks!

 

[cosmocanuck]

Please disregard my above followup message. I'm encountering further unrelated issues and have taken this up with my hosting provider. Thanks!

 

[Sebahat.hadzhi]

Apologies for the late reply. I hope your hosting provider will be able to help you determining what's causing the issue.

 

[cosmocanuck]

They did! It was merely automated server backups, I went to "Backup & Restore" on the main Plesk screen and deleted older backups - voila! problem solved.