As I’ve been telling before, due the increased number of sites on my server, I’m hitting its limits. Mainly the fact the server got only 1 GB of RAM is putting limitations. Recently the server was acting up again, and I assumed it was caused by resource limits, therefore I attempted to tune the configuration a little more to use less resources, without any luck.
I started to notice this problem showed different characteristics the problems I’ve been experiencing before. Mainly because it seemed also to influence the mail system rather then just the webserver. The problem seemed to be linked to the mysql server. Restarting the server didn’t work as it should. Defenately something with mysql…. So I decided to start mysql in a console to look and I saw
mysqld: Disk is full writing './mysql-bin.~rec~' (Errcode: 28). Waiting for someone to free space... (Expect up to 60 secs delay for server to continue after freeing disk space)
The problem: the root file system was full: In all the time the server was running, of course I have frequently been upgrading the system. During all this time, packages were downloaded to /var/cache/pacman/pkg and never removed. So… it was eating a couple of gigabytes…. and the root file system is just a small filesystem, just for the OS. The data is elsewhere.
Another mystery solved.