My Web Server Space And Ringtones

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My Web Server Space And Ringtones

9 March 2007

Author: Mind Posted under Knowledge

When I receive a warning message on my email telling me that my web server space is running out, I was a little bit confused. It is true that my hard disk space is not huge. But running out just in a months is impossible.

This Blog is actually running on 25 megs drive space, and it was plenty of space I thought. By one or two regular posting a day with small parts of graphics on it, I think the space will be full in a year. However I have to pin point the source of error which ate up my space, before this Blog getting locked.

I opened my web server control panel to figure out my drive usage. It showed me that the free space is only 1 mb left, what ?…. Where those files comes from ?…. Indeed have I installed 3 sub domain on this server: 1 sub-domain running wordpress, and 2 others only PHP scripts to display Books and Ringtones. But how can it be so big?

I calculated the file size from my local repository on my computer. Two wordpress installation is using around 10 megs space, book store’s script requires around 2 megs, and Ringtones script is 3 megs. Roughly it must be 10 megs space left, but the fact was different.

At first I was suspecting wp-cache as the source of files filling drive space, because to do it’s function, this plugin creates .html files from every pages you see in this Blog. But when I see the cache folder, the total file size was not big, so the files must be comes from another source.
Then I figure out the Ringtones folder, because it was rather suspicious. In my computer, when zipped this folder size is less than 1 mb. But it consist of hundreds of small size files in many sub directories some directories even have 4 levels sub directories.
I wasn’t realize about the side effects of this huge types of sub-directories, because it was not prominent under my windows explorer. But it is actually counts and piled up your server. Finally I deleted this sub-directory and it’s sub-domain as well.

Peekaboo…! my drive space back to 12 megs and this is exactly the size I was expected. Now I got a new experience about directories and it’s effects on hard drive space. I think It’s better to have one big chunk rather than many small files but dispersed through out deep sub-directories - because it will be easier to figure out the size without exploring very deep into sub-directory. Yet I still have something to do… moving my ringtones to it’s new place….