Other reasons for "no space left on device" than fully used folder?

Question

I have a tests that I run on a device which has a 300M of ram-disk based /tmp and I get "no space left on device" even though when I run df -h I find that only 11% of the /tmp is actually used.

I am very confused, any hints on what should I look for?

Is it really _not enough space left_ as opposed to _no space left_? What application is it? — Stéphane Chazelas, Dec 20 '17 at 21:17
@StéphaneChazelas it was a mistake, I added enough mistakenly. I have edited the question, thank you for pointing it out — Bionix1441, Dec 21 '17 at 07:36

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 20 '17 at 17:08

4

Two hypotheses come to mind:

Running out of inodes (df -i)
Disk quota for the user exceeded (quota -u username)

answered Dec 20 '17 at 17:08

DopeGhoti

73,792
8
97
133

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 20 '17 at 17:18

It may well be that the test tries to create a file that's bigger than the available space, and it is deleted when hitting the "not enough space" condition. Try to monitor the disk space permanently on another console while running the test:

$ while true; do df -h /tmp; sleep 0.5; done

Other reasons for "no space left on device" than fully used folder?

2 Answers2