im just asking because i have a live site right now and don't want to interrupt service...

the extra 25% disk space Linode has offered as it's 8th bday gift.(thank you!) is showing on my control panel as available.

they mention in a very non-nonchalant manner to simply resize the disk to take advantage of the new space. which is awesome.

my question is.. will this take my site offline? will this erase my files or re-partition my drive? is there any risk in doing this?

thank you!

Hi,

You don't need to reformat or anything, but you will need ot shut down your linode while re-sizing the disks, be it up or down in size.

Your data won't be affected by this though.

You have to shutdown, then resize. while the resize is in progress you can click boot, and it will queue the job and start the boot as soon as the resize finishes. All going well, you'll be back up in a few minutes and all your data will be in tact.

There is a risk of data loss, though, so check your backups are working, and backup just before the resize to play it safe.

perfect answers.

thank you both.

and thanks again Linode.

FYI, it took 43s to resize my Linode 512 without any problem

My 1024 took 2m 48s from shutdown to startup, including the resize.

Linode was very generous in giving us all that extra disk space. Thanks guys!!

Bruce

well im not going to giveaway my 240 day uptime for extra disk!

Yay for useless metrics.

well i went ahead and shut down. took 12 seconds.
resized the disk from 32gb to 40gb. then queued up a 'boot' job.

14 minutes later and it's still resizing!

does the amount of files on the disk beforehand affect the time this process takes?

i am hosting upward of 100,000 files..

or has the process hung or something?

getting a bit worried now. site is offline and im concerned for the files..

16 mins.. and the process is stuck at 25% with 'boot' in 'waiting' status...

phew!

back up.
total time of exactly 20 mins.

just in time too..

from this
/dev/xvda 32114736 30207384 586148 99% /

to this
/dev/xvda 40270848 30202088 8826200 78% /


once again. thanks Linode!

Fyi yes the number of files does matter (or if memory serves the number of inodes)

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It's generally a very bad thing to fill a filesystem that much, for performance reasons.

confucius say: man who run in front of car get tired.

IIRC linux filesystems tend to allocate "reserved" blocks, typically 5% of disk space is reserved and cannot be allocated except by certain privileged processes.

So if you check disk space and find only 1% remaining, it may actually be more like 6%, is that right??

Lemme know if I'm way wrong on this. If so, it'd mean that there really shouldn't be all that much performance hit if you reach 99% full, shouldn't there?