WHM/cPanel space requirments and reclaiming diskspace.

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?

 

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?

 

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.

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

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.

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.