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OS is Debian. I have a few systems that seem to not be freeing disk space correctly.

On a normal system:

du --max-depth 1 / --exclude=/proc -h -x

Seems to almost exactly agree with:

df -h /

ie, ~800 gigs are reported used in both cases for my normal system test case.

On an affected system, df shows 95 gigs used, but du only shows ~55 gigs used!

This is a huge discrepancy, especially compounded by the fact that the affected system also reports 0 bytes available for /.

lsof | grep deleted

shows nothing. Filesystem is ext4.

What is going on here?

Edit: The issue ended up being a problem with lsof. To briefly summarize: running lsof without any parameters ended up taking so long (hours) that it appeared that nothing was getting returned, but I think lsof was just getting killed. Running lsof like this: lsof / | grep deleted was much, much faster, would exit correctly, and when doing so would show one very large deleted file. Running lsof / also excludes any other mount points, even if they are "inside" of /.

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  • Maybe you have a directory on which something is mounted, so the contents are masked by the mount. Commented Jul 31, 2024 at 1:23
  • Are you running du as root or your normal account? Also, how many inodes are in use (df -i /)? You might also want to do an fsck to make sure that the filesystem isn't acting up. Commented Jul 31, 2024 at 18:18

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