Linux VPS Disk and Inode Cleanup: du, find, lsof

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

No space left on device. The error stops your application cold, and the first instinct — delete some logs and move on — usually misses what is actually wrong. A full disk on a VPS is rarely one obvious huge file; it is more often a directory you forgot about, a log that a process is still writing to after you "deleted" it, or — the one that fools almost everyone the first time — a disk with plenty of free space that has run out of inodes. This guide walks the diagnosis in the order an experienced administrator actually does it, with the three tools that find every case: du, df, and lsof.

Logrotate for Nginx and App Logs on a Linux VPS

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

 1/var/log/myapp/*.log {
 2 daily
 3 rotate 14
 4 compress
 5 delaycompress
 6 missingok
 7 notifempty
 8 create 0640 www-data adm
 9 sharedscripts
10 postrotate
11 systemctl reload myapp >/dev/null 2>&1 || true
12 endscript
13}

That single stanza is the whole job: it keeps two weeks of compressed application logs, never lets them grow without bound, and tells the app to reopen its log file cleanly after each rotation. Every directive in it earns its place, and getting one of them wrong — particularly the postrotate signal — is how a server ends up writing gigabytes into a "rotated" file nobody is reading. This guide explains the stanza line by line, applies the same pattern to nginx, and shows how to test a rule safely before it runs unattended at 3 a.m.

Disk-Space on LinuxHosted.com

Linux VPS Disk and Inode Cleanup: du, find, lsof

Logrotate for Nginx and App Logs on a Linux VPS