Growing "Root %" - What's the cause?

#1

I figured I would ask this here since the “Root %” on the OLED is a feature of this product.

My number when first creating my OMV 6 with Plex was about 11%. I added PiHole and it shot up to 50%. I have since decided to not use it as a PiHole, so I uninstalled Portainer and the PiHole container. Everything looks the way it did before, but my Root % is still in the 50’s and goes up a percent every couple of days…

What’s to stop it from slowing down my system by increasing until it’s at 100 and not having room to work?

Also, what is the root %?

I assumed it referred to the SD card…my Root drive. But maybe it’s gone up because I have 4 hard drives attached and my storage is about 50% used up on all of those together?

Let me know.

-------As a side question…is it possible to program the OLED screen to display custom messages and information? I’d love to set it up to say hello with my name or other thinga when various things happen. I’d love to see individual disk temps and such too.

#2

Root is your the second partition of you SD card (first is the boot usually).
It contains the operating system and the programs (settings, logs, etc.)
The latest official software has some bugs, this is the reason why you can only see root %.

I made some bugfixes and tweaks in the code.
Read a little bit over here: [Fixes and New Features] Fixed disk usage display, disk temperatures, disk and network activity, fan speed percentage display on OLED display, improved uptime format

1 Like
#3

Usual suspect is logs and log rotate is not functioning correctly

#4

Any starting points for fixing that?

#5

I linked for you my other post where I fixed this issue.
Please read it and ask after if something is not clear for you.

#6

I would note that the use of “sudo smartctl” to read the hard drive temperatures in the latest misc.py code will cause service log messages for each disk polled for temperature. At least it did for me, so I took the sudo out of the check_output line (around 241). The service is already running as root and didn’t need to sudo to run smartctl.

Log messages were visible through “systemctl status rockpi-sata.service”.

Of course, if @theheapstoe is not using this code and outputting disk temperatures that wouldn’t be a problem.

#7

Yeah do a google for logrotate as its a pretty fundemental knowledge requirement

#8

@RayMondDrakon Armbian do a script for zram that bind mounts a zstd zram drive for /var/log as really the only thing ever bashing sd cards is logs.

Home assistant also have similar where they use overlayfs with the same zstd zram as an upper that on shutdown gets pushed to lower so logs are persistant.

Logs are great but can be a pain especiaslly on a sd card.

#9

Thank you for your reply!

On my Raspbian I also run an up to date version of smartd service.
But I still need to run smartctl with sudo because of without root privileges in the result.

Eg: smartctl -A /dev/sda -j
Result:

...
 "messages": [
      {
        "string": "Smartctl open device: /dev/sda [SAT] failed: Permission denied",
        "severity": "error"
      }
    ],
    "exit_status": 2
...