Inconsistency between "du -sh" and "df -h"

Question

Possible Duplicate:
du vs. df difference

I am running a server with Debian stable.

If I call:

df -h

this is the result I get:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/my-var   2.8G  2.3G  358M  87% /var

While if I call:

du -sh /var

This is the result I get:

832M    /var

How can this happen? Which one is correct? Thank you!

Hello, welcome to serverfault, this question has already been here : http://serverfault.com/questions/57098/du-vs-df-difference — , Dec 24 '12 at 12:32
lsof | grep deleted and check whether the deleted files are still holding space and then if required, restart the service — Soham Chakraborty, Dec 24 '12 at 12:47

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 24 '12 at 12:35

One quite common reason, especially on /var is that some processes keep files open that are already deleted. The system will not actually free the space until they are closed, but they are not listed anymore and therefore not seen by du.

/var keeps log files among other things and this sort of issue can easily happen there.

Inconsistency between "du -sh" and "df -h"

1 Answers1