How big should my root partition be?

[yottabyte]

Hey everyone,

My 10 GB root partition is filling up mysteriously and I can't figure out what is taking up the space. Aside from the default install, which totaled at about 4.5 GB, and some small utility programs I have not added any large packages except for Wine. So I thought that perhaps all the system updates that occurred for the past six months left some trash behind and I tried 'rpmorphan', but that did nothing. Now I am at 6.8 GB used and 3.2 GB free.

So what am I missing here? Is this to be expected, or is there something that I can do to clean up my root partition? And what can be causing this? If not, then how big should my root partition be? If I remember correctly, the installer originally set the size for root to 20 GB, I think.

BTW: This was a clean Fedora 13 install and not an upgrade from Fedora 12. Also, I am using the 64-bit edition.

[SlowJet]

Use the disk gui tool to see where stuff is.

I think you will be fine unless you go server nutts.
You have rpm cache and logs which will start to rotate out.
email may build up.
Check the /tmp and /var/tmp and clean it up as neeeded.

SJ

[lineak]

try bleachbit for cleaning.

[jpollard]

One large pig of space is that used for updates. In my case, I have 340MB in /var/cache/yum, another 286MB in var/cache/abrt.

I know this doesn't look like much, but it will grow as updates are added.

/var has a lot of stuff - it is the default location for web servers, spooling, and
VM images (/var/lib/libvirt/images).

With a 20 GB root filesystem you really should have /tmp mounted from somewhere
else (or at least mount /var/tmp from somewhere else, and erase the filesystem
before mounting).

Not to mention /home...

[stevea]

It depends, but if you intend to install a lot of packages and do large compules then 25GB for 32bit Fedora nd ~30GB for 64bit seems enough.

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             30237648  19460144   9241504  68% /
...

Doing a "du -s --si dirname" for all of the directories in "/" (except /dev /proc and the mounted ones) ohelps hunt down the removable just. The system above has 338MB in a .wine config and 120MB in .mozilla caches.
As JP notes, /var has become a pigpen in recent years. "ccache -C" and "yum clean all" can help, but you still need space for those caches.

To hunt down the files consider ....
du -s --si ...
kdirstat
konqueror (in file management mode, then select View-> 'File Size Mode'
filelight

Even 'find' can be extremely useful
find / -type f -size +10M #list all regular files >10MB in size
find / -empty # list all empty files and dirs



filelight