Skip to content
OrbixPanel OrbixPanel Tutorials

Find what's eating your disk space and memory

“Disk full” and “out of memory” are two of the most common reasons a site goes down. Both are quick to diagnose.

How full is the disk?

Terminal window
df -h

Look at the Use% column for /. If it’s near 100%, you need to free space.

Find the culprits — run this in a folder and it shows the size of everything inside, largest last:

Terminal window
du -sh * | sort -h

Common space-eaters:

  • Logs — old application and server logs. Truncate (don’t delete the file while it’s open): : > big.log
  • Backups kept locally — move them offsite instead.
  • node_modules / vendor — rebuilt on deploy, safe to clear and redeploy.
  • Uploaded media — large images/videos pile up fast.

System journal taking space? Check and trim it:

Terminal window
journalctl --disk-usage
sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=7d   # keep only the last 7 days

How much memory is left?

Terminal window
free -m

Watch the available column (MB). If it’s tiny and the server is swapping, find what’s using it:

Terminal window
top        # press Shift+M to sort by memory

On a small server, the usual fixes are: run fewer heavy processes, add a swap file, enable caching, or move up a size. See Understanding usage limits.

In OrbixPanel you don’t have to do this by hand — per-site CPU, memory, and disk are shown in the dashboard, with alerts when a site crosses its limit.

Running OrbixPanel? Live resource monitoring is built in. OrbixPanel.com → — the free, self-hosted, AI-powered hosting control panel.