System Quotas is extremely large

Hello there... Have all a good month!

I am having an issue with a client's account. It is about a "custom" hosting plan which has 250 email accounts and a total of 6250 MB of disk space and 5GB of traffic.

Tonight I received an email notification from the server, saying that this account has reached the 96.7% of his allocated disk space. Trying to check if the emails are so much and if he needs any upgrade I saw the attached screenshot. Please note that the account has only emails and not website. I also checked the folder sizes through the File Manager, but I don't see that there is such a usage as System Quotas shows.

Can you help me find what does it take the remaining disk space and see if it's something that can be deleted or maintained (eg. logs)?

Thanks a lot in advance for your attention.


Kind regards,
Angelos Pitsos

try manual check:


and


Regards

Hi mate!

The second command returns the following:

Disk quotas for user schippnl (uid 561):
Filesystem blocks quota limit grace files quota limit grace
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
3260244 6400000 7040000 82707 0 0

Click to expand...

The first command was running for ages and I had to stop it. I assume that I should run it as root user, correct? I don't have the credentials for his user account.


Kind Regards,
Angelos Pitsos

Yes it should as root.

Regarding the second well im confused.

Apparently is using 3.2gb witha a quota of 6.4gb, is this correct?

Maybe DA tally isnt running and the values isnt up2date?

Regards

Yes it is! That's why I was wondering where is the disk space consumed.

I suppose that tally is not updated for some reason, cause os quota check seems to be correct.

Take a look on this link: http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=42

Regards

Hi Andrea,

This is mostly for VPS. My server is not a VPS. It is a physical server and I doubt if the problem is this. All the other accounts works great... I just do not see where and how the available disk space of this account is allocated.

Any other idea, please?


Regards,
Angelos Pitsos

??? that is not for VPS, that is standard commands for OS, and, the first one show you quota for a partiton, the last one manually run the tally

Regards

Angelos, in your screenshot I see you have 'hide entries already included in system quotas checked'. Have you unchecked that and updated? That might tell you what you need to know.

Jeff

Hello Jeff,

Thank you very much for your reply. It was my fault as I didn't notice that check box. So I am attaching you the new screenshot of this window. From this window we can see now that 2.29 GB are consumed by the imap folder and 2.58GB for System Quotas. I am wondering if the 2.29GB are included in the "System Quotas" or it is additional. The fact is that it now shows that the whole account consumes 2640.6 MB in total if you login with this account you see the progress green bar to stay about in the middle, which is normal if the account has a quota of 6.250 MB.

On 1/8 (after this post) I asked my client to check his mail accounts and he said that he was sure that there was nothing else consuming disk space except the email accounts. Not any FTP or stored files or anything else. So he deleted (!!!) two of the 163 emails accounts (probably not that important) and he refreshed the bandwidth. Then he saw what I can see now. That he consumes about the half of the available disk space! The point is that couldn't be happened as the email accounts were not consuming that much! They were just a few megabytes or hundreds of megabytes. Then he (and I as well) was wondering what would happened if he would try to update the bandwidth indicator without deleting the account

Strange issues that I can't understand. But I have one question that you may be able to answer, because of your experience and seniority. Is it possible the system making a mistake on the calculation and send that email notification, saying that the user 'schippnl' has been used up the 96.7% of his allocated disk space?

Thank you very much and have a great day!


Kind regards,
Angelos Pitsos

I won't say it's impossible and from time to time I've seen the system somehow not be accurate on bandwidth, but I don't know how it could happen on diskspace; I believe the counters rely on OS-based tools for all the calculations except for MySQL database size (hopefully DirectAdmin staff will let us know if I'm mistaken).

However we'll never know with certainty if the space was used in those two email accounts if you didn't refresh the bandwidth count and check before he deleted them.

Jeff

Hello,

To clarify, files in the imap folder are owned by the User, thus are included in the System quotas, which is why DA shows "No" for counted on the imap folder (because the System Quotas are counted, and the include the imap folder)

The "Email Disk Usage" is DA's manual count of the usage on disk, but is not added to the total, since DA assumes that the System Quotas (which include Email Disk Usage) should already be correct.

I too have seen the system quotas be off sometimes (rarely, but sometimes), in which case running the quotacheck can repair this info.
http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=42

Regarding the usage shown by the Filemanager, the size of a file is always going to be smaller than the amount of disk usage used.
This is because of the usual 4k block size (minimum amount of space used per file).
For example, a file with 1 byte in it will have a 1 byte file size, but will use 4k of disk space.
A file which is 6k in size, will use 8k of disk space (2 blocks).

You can get more info for a disk usage breakdown by running the quota for a User manually, eg:
http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=222

but the table that DA generates is based on this, so just seems like a system quota issue to me.
You'd use this guide to search your filesystem for user owned files, to compare (roughly) with the system quotas.
http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=39

Doing a "du" on /home/user is not always accurate because there may be files elsewhere on the system, outside of that directory.

I hope this helps clarify of few of the things which appear to be inaccurate.

John

Hello there!

Thank you very much for your replies. I will have a look on these and see what can I do.


Kind regards,
Angelos Pitsos

If anyone has this problem, in my case I found out that it was because of files belonging to the user that was in the "/tmp" folder and were not properly deleted.

(I know that the topic is from 2012 and you are probably married and have children, but still, in 2021 I found this topic with a Google search, so maybe you can have the possibility of some information here is out of date.)

These links help to found and fix the issue: