From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jan 20 07:01:16 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B66D916A4CE for ; Thu, 20 Jan 2005 07:01:16 +0000 (GMT) Received: from dan.emsphone.com (dan.emsphone.com [199.67.51.101]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0402643D46 for ; Thu, 20 Jan 2005 07:01:16 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from dan@dan.emsphone.com) Received: (from dan@localhost) by dan.emsphone.com (8.13.1/8.13.1) id j0K71EXt050149; Thu, 20 Jan 2005 01:01:14 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from dan) Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 01:01:13 -0600 From: Dan Nelson To: Phillip Salzman Message-ID: <20050120070113.GC7352@dan.emsphone.com> References: <00b001c4fea0$7533d490$6745a8c0@MESE> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <00b001c4fea0$7533d490$6745a8c0@MESE> X-OS: FreeBSD 5.3-STABLE X-message-flag: Outlook Error User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.6i cc: stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Very large directory X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 07:01:16 -0000 In the last episode (Jan 19), Phillip Salzman said: > I have a pair of servers that act as SMTP/AV gateways. It seems that > even though we've told the AV software not to store messages, it is > anyway. > > They've been running for a little while now - and recently we've > noticed a lot of disk space disappearing. Shortly after that, a > simple du into our /var/spool returned a not so nice error: > > du: fts_read: Cannot allocate memory > > No matter what command I run on that directory, I just don't seem to > have enough available resources to show the files let alone delete > them (echo *, ls, find, rm -rf, etc.) Try raising your datasize rlimit value; also see the thread "Directories with 2 million files" at http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2004-April/026170.html for some other ideas. "find . | xargs rm" sounds promising. -- Dan Nelson dnelson@allantgroup.com