Tracing file size changes

[Adam Lee]

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 07:06:29PM -0400, Chris wrote:
> I'm trying to think of a good way to figure out where space is going on
> somewhat large and busy filesystems.  Often I will be notified by nagios that I
> am running out of space somewhere, and it will even tell me what the trend in
> usage is.  So now I know that I lost a bunch of space recently.
> 
> There are several things I can do at that point:
> - Check quota usage.  If quotas are working correctly, this can sometimes
> help when one user is obviously using a ton of space.  More often than not,
> there is nothing obvious, quotas aren't working or the space is used by system
> accounts that provide no help in knowing where the space went.
> - Use du.  This is just plain painful and time consuming.  Doing this usually
> causes too much load.
> 
> Without knowing other ways to find information, I was thinking it would be
> really nice to have a way to see which files or directories grew or shrank
> since some point in the past.  Would it be possible to get the kernel to tell
> me when files were opened for writing and closed so I could record the size
> difference?  I know there are various file notify mechanisms, but from what I
> can see, they don't handle millions of files very well.
> 
> Of course I'm open to other ideas, but this was my curiosity.
> 

Will Inotify help?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inotify
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online/pages/man7/inotify.7.html

-- 
Regards,
Adam Lee
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