Thursday, September 04, 2008

Thank heaven for sparse files!

We use ImageMagick to do a lot of image processing. I'm not sure what it's up to, but some processing needs to create temporary working files that can be quite large (in /var/tmp by default, I've moved them with TMPDIR because that filled up).

However, I now see this:

/bin/ls -l /storage/tmp
total 203037932
-rw------- 1 user grp 169845176062560 Sep 4 11:18 magick-XXT0aaXE
-rw------- 1 user grp 222497224416 Sep 4 13:24 magick-XXU0aaXE
-rw------- 1 user grp 11499827272024 Sep 4 13:11 magick-XXbFaiKF
-rw------- 1 user grp 15064771904 Sep 4 13:24 magick-XXcFaiKF
-rw------- 1 user grp 18904557170048 Sep 4 10:51 magick-XXtlaGCE
-rw------- 1 user grp 24764978480 Sep 4 13:24 magick-XXulaGCE

or, in more readable units a few seconds later:

/bin/ls -lhs /storage/tmp
total 203038194
33272257 -rw------- 1 user grp 154T Sep 4 11:18 magick-XXT0aaXE
34295031 -rw------- 1 user grp 207G Sep 4 13:24 magick-XXU0aaXE
29432967 -rw------- 1 user grp 10T Sep 4 13:11 magick-XXbFaiKF
9271301 -rw------- 1 user grp 14G Sep 4 13:24 magick-XXcFaiKF
48382483 -rw------- 1 user grp 17T Sep 4 10:51 magick-XXtlaGCE
48384155 -rw------- 1 user grp 23G Sep 4 13:24 magick-XXulaGCE

Ouch. That's on an internal 146G drive.

What on earth is it doing with a 154 terabyte file?

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