WHM/cPanel space requirments and reclaiming diskspace.

[ManuelT]

Last night a WHM/cPanel VPS tripped over the 80% mark of total disk space used. The VPS is small having only 10GB disk space however I figured that it was probably a couple of log folders that had not been rotated etc.

I've done a bit of an audit of the machine and are slightly worried by the results.

WHM/cPanel seems to want about 4GB of install space and i'm not talking about things like perl modules or apache which would be installed by WHM.

The break down is like follows.

/home is 1.7G but only 400M is user sites so 1.3G is mostly by cpanel
/home/easyapache 186M
/home/installd 137M
/home/.cpan 951M

1.5G in /usr/local/cpanel

The other Gig is split around in a dozen or so smaller places with 50-100M each.

Is this normal? Is there a clean up fuction to get rid of some of this that may have failed?

 

[cPanelTristan]

Hello ManuelT,

This is normal for the space requirements for cPanel. The cPanel installation guide notes the following as minimum requirements:

cPanel Installation Guide

A minimum requirement is the lowest specification that a server can have in order to still operate at any level. I would recommend having double the size of the space you do currently as a better option for how much is needed to allow multiple sites on the server.

If you have cpanel-rollback folder at /usr/local/cpanel-rollback location, this can be removed and would be about the only component that could be removed. You would also want to disable it in WHM > Tweak Settings:

Enable cPanel Software RollBack. [?]

This feature turns on a build archiving and restoration facility, allowing the server administrator to “roll back” their cPanel installation to previous build. All files are stored on the server.

Thanks.

 

[ManuelT]

Really?

I've just checked inside /home/.cpan/build and every perl module since the server was built is still there so for example

YAML-0.68
YAML-0.70
YAML-0.71
YAML-0.72

If your going to be keeping every module ever complied on the machine 10G soon looks fairly small and i'm suprised that any machine can keep within 10G after about 4 or so years.

Is there a technical reason to keep this number of old versions?

 

[cPanelTristan]

You are welcome to clean any of the old perl modules installed via .cpan (the perl installer). I would wonder how much space such modules are taking. They might be there simply for historical purposes or to allow reverting to a prior version if needed.

Of note, when operating a system at the minimum required values, that system will perform at the minimum operational levels. For most software that is published, the minimum means the bare minimum that will allow the software to function.

Also, I do agree that 10GB looks fairly small in this day and age of 1TB+ drives.

 

[ManuelT]

You are welcome to clean any of the old perl modules installed via .cpan (the perl installer). I would wonder how much space such modules are taking.

I performed the actions from http://forums.cpanel.net/f189/1-1gb-home-cpan-158301.html and saved just shy of 1GB (951MB down to 16MB) which is after about 2 years of running this machine.

They might be there simply for historical purposes or to allow reverting to a prior version if needed.

Might they be there because people are to lazy to remove them?

Of note, when operating a system at the minimum required values, that system will perform at the minimum operational levels. For most software that is published, the minimum means the bare minimum that will allow the software to function.

Duly noted. However I find it odd that hard disk space would make cPanel perform at the minimum operational levels. Disk space tends to be there or not and not slow the machine down like waiting for CPU cycles or paging to disk might. It's interesting to know what cPanel would define the 10G recommended minimum as, is it purely the cPanel scripts ignoring all the software it downloads, the OS and logs? I would have been facing much the same problem had I had a 1TB drive but with 990GB's of user sites in the home folder. I had 10GB for cPanel however this way rapidly decreasing due to what appears to be bad housekeeping. Or are you in fact saying that 10GB for the scripts might not be enough to run at full operational levels and it's probably better to leave 20GB or better still 30GB.

Also, I do agree that 10GB looks fairly small in this day and age of 1TB+ drives.

It certainly does when developers get lazy and don't care about cleaning up after themselves or condensing code (not referencing Cpanel here). Programs today which fundamentally haven't changed in over 10 years seem to take orders of magnitude larger disk space/RAM/CPU I have always assumed that it's simply because it's not an issue like it once once with everything getting faster or larger all the time. However this probably isn't the place for this chit chat so I'll get back to the questions.

The forums seem to be littered with housekeeping tips/tricks like the one I've just had to perform. Is there any current scripts that automates any of these housekeeping jobs or is it a case of system warns on disk space and sysadmin had to perform remedial work?

If it's the latter I'll put it in as a feature request.

 

[cPanelTristan]

Disk space tends to be there or not and not slow the machine down like waiting for CPU cycles or paging to disk might. It's interesting to know what cPanel would define the 10G recommended minimum as, is it purely the cPanel scripts ignoring all the software it downloads, the OS and logs? I would have been facing much the same problem had I had a 1TB drive but with 990GB's of user sites in the home folder. I had 10GB for cPanel however this way rapidly decreasing due to what appears to be bad housekeeping. Or are you in fact saying that 10GB for the scripts might not be enough to run at full operational levels and it's probably better to leave 20GB or better still 30GB.

It isn't that the disk space will slow down the system but that it will limit the system's ability to operate or function. Any software that indicates a disk space minimum will normally mean that you must have at least that much space on your machine for it to run. Some software that adds components over time will not run once you run out of disk space and your entire system might well not run once you fill it to capacity, so the minimum is the bare minimum amount you can expect the software to function on a new installation of that software. It would be better to have double what you do currently (so 20GB) if possible as I stated.

Please note that operational or functional here doesn't mean slowdown or CPU, it means that if you fill your server to full disk space, Apache and cPanel wouldn't be able to write to /usr anymore and then cPanel won't continue to run and sites may well not serve pages in a browser. Users won't be able to write to /home any longer so FTP uploads will produce errors while email sending and receiving will not work. Exim won't be able to write to /var any long and so exim won't run properly. The system will not function normally anymore.

The forums seem to be littered with housekeeping tips/tricks like the one I've just had to perform. Is there any current scripts that automates any of these housekeeping jobs or is it a case of system warns on disk space and sysadmin had to perform remedial work?

There isn't a current script that I'm aware to automate what you've done. You are welcome to open a feature request if you would like to see something to clear the old perl module versions that aren't being used any longer to free up space, though, of course.