Introduction

This article will show you various ways to monitor your server's disk space. Each hosting platform has a specific allocated disk space. As your disk usage increases, you may notice a decrease in your server's performance.

View disk usage

You may view your Disk Usage Report at anytime in your AccountCenter. For detailed instructions and screenshots, please see: Viewing disk usage on your (gs) Grid-Service.

View disk space from Plesk

1. Log into your Power User Panel, see Figure 1. For instructions on how to access, please see: Three Plesk panels: Power User Panel.

   
   Figure 1. Power User Panel

2. Total disk usage is listed by percentage at the top, see Figure 2.

   
   Figure 2.

3. You can also view a breakdown of the disk usage. From the left menu, click on Resources.
4. Next, click on the Disk tab, see Figure 3.

   
   Figure 3.

1. Log into your Plesk control panel.
2. Click on Virtuozzo:

   

3. Click on Resources:

   

4. You should now see information regarding your server's disk space.

   

View disk space from SSH

1. Connect to your server via SSH. For detailed instructions, please read this article.
2. Change directory:

   cd ../..

3. Run this command:

   du -sh

   Code translation

   • du: This is the estimate file space usage.
   • -s: Display only a total for each argument.
   • -h: Print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G).

   The output will look similar to this:

   
   gs-example.com:/home/69855$ du -sh
   du: `./users/username%mt-example.com': Permission denied
   du: `./users/username%gs-example.com': Permission denied
   du: `./users/user%gs-example.com': Permission denied
   112M    .

   
   

   The "Permission denied" notice is expected since the mail directory is owned by the individual email user, not the Server Administrator.

To check your Total Disk Usage for your entire (dv) Dedicated-Virtual Server via SSH you can type the following:

df -h

The first column displayed is the device, in this case your (dv). The next three columns show the total size, the amount used, and the amount available.

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vzfs 20G 658M 19G 4% /
simfs 20G 658M 19G 4% /tmp
simfs 20G 658M 19G 4% /var/tmp

Another useful command is du. Running this command will list all directories with their filesize from your current directory.

du

A good example of using this command would be to view the sizes of your site's directories:

du -m /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs

To show the total directory size of the current directory, you can run the following command:

du -csh

To show directory sizes as a listing, you can use the command:

du -sh *

Searching for large files

You can use the following command to search for files over 10MB in size:

site=`pwd | awk -F/ '{ print $3 }'`; find /home/$site/ -type f -size +10000k -print0 | xargs −0 ls -lhSr | awk '{printf "%*s %s\n", 7, $k":",$9}'

The output will look similar to this:

find: /home/69855/users/username%mt-example.com: Permission denied
find: /home/69855/users/username%gs-example.com: Permission denied
find: /home/69855/users/user%gs-example.com: Permission denied
-rw-r--r--  1 gs-example.com gs-example.com 16M Jun  7  2010 /home/69855/data/squirrelmail/Ny6oAM1v63eLUlQxlEXaOnNHXtSeYukE: /home/69855/data/squirrelmail/Ny6oAM1v63eLUlQxlEXaOnNHXtSeYukE

Again, the "Permission denied" notice is expected since the mail directory is owned by the individual email user, not the Server Administrator.

find / -mount -noleaf -type f -size +10000k -print0 | xargs -0 ls -lhSr | perl -ne '/(\S+\s+){4}(\S+)\s+(\S+\s+){3}(.*)/ and printf("%*s %s\n",7,$2.":",$4);'

Resources

• Large log files are a common cause of unexpected issues on your (dv). To prevent this, you can configure log rotation from within Plesk.
  • (dv) Configuring log rotation
• Failed domain backups can be another common cause of unexpected full disk space. Be sure to remove any files related to a failed Plesk backup.
• For information on how to remove large files, please see Common SSH Commands.
• Consider adding temporary disk space.