I am using Ubuntu. I have a root partition and a separate, large ext4 data partition. The data partition has ~2GB free according to df
and with that, things are fine.
I experience a repeatable behaviour in which the system generally slows down when the data partition fills up. As free space on the data partition shrinks to ~1GB, I find many applications start stalling during normal operations (copy-paste, loading web pages, ls
, etc). The problem goes away if I free up space.
I am experiencing the ebb and flow of this problem a lot since I am syncing blockchain and have to periodically delete things to make room. This is a reliable, repeatable pattern. I am quite sure it is a hard disk access issue.
I have NO swap partition, and several gigabyes of unused RAM.
Why does it happen when there is still "lots" (~1GB) of space free. Is
df
lying about the available space?Other than deleting more stuff, is there anything I can do to make the system more responsive in the low free space state? I would expect the system to still be responsive even with zero free space, but it isn't.