'Not enough space on disk' errors in Confluence 6.5 or later when disk space is available

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Platform notice: Server and Data Center only. This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Server and Data Center platforms.

Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.

*Except Fisheye and Crucible

Problem

Confluence 6.5 or later throws "not enough space on disk" errors in Linux operating systems, but there is plenty of free space available on the file system.

You see errors similar to this in the atlassian-confluence.log:

Caused by: java.io.IOException: There is not enough space on the disk


Diagnosis

Environment

This problem affects Confluence instances running on Linux with EXT2, EXT3 or EXT4 file systems. 

Diagnostic steps

Run the following command to check inode usage in your file system.

df -i

This will enable to you check whether you have exhausted the inode allocation for the file system where your <home-directory>/attachments directory (or <shared-home>/attachments in the case of Data Center instances) is located.

Cause

When creating an EXT2, EXT3, or EXT4 file system a fixed number of inodes are allocated (essentially limiting the total number of files and directories that can be created on the file system, regardless of size). When files are uploaded to pages, Confluence creates a series of directories and stores a file for each version of the file, plus an additional file containing text extracted from the latest version (if it happens to be a text-based file), for indexing purposes. These files are generally quite small, so over time this can add up to a lot of individual files and directories, and may mean you run out of inodes.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, you will likely need to migrate your home directory to another file system or disk partition that has been provisioned with a greater number of inodes, or to a file system type that does not reserve a fixed amount of inodes (such as XFS, JFS etc).


Last modified on Jan 25, 2018

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