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I use a system with a / partition and no /home partition (I'm working on changing that) and noted that my root was rather large.

I ran the commands :
cd /
and
sudo du -sh --exclude=home

the du command returned :
26G

This struck me as odd because I remember reading that 12GB is "comfy" for the size of a root partition, given that was in regard to Ubuntu 14.something.

Am I doing something wrong? Is this related to not having a separate /home partition? Or is this normal?

MichaelB
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1 Answers1

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When I only exclude /home I get:

$ sudo du -sh --exclude=home
du: cannot access './run/user/1000/gvfs': Permission denied
du: cannot access './proc/14676/task/14676/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access './proc/14676/task/14676/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access './proc/14676/fd/3': No such file or directory
du: cannot access './proc/14676/fdinfo/3': No such file or directory
241G    .

A more accurate picture can be seen using:

$ sudo du -sh --exclude={home,media,mnt,proc,run,sys,tmp,tmpfs,var}
13G .

There you go 13 GB for "normal" versus 241 GB for "unusually large". Of course you need to use cd / before executing above commands.

In my case most of the excess baggage is in /mnt which contains two Windows installations and two Ubuntu installations (in addition the one mounted at /).

In /run or /media you can have your phone or USB sticks mounted. In /sys and /proc there are temporary virtual file systems created. In /var there are log files which can grow quite large but are empty on new installations. In /proc lies running processes which in the first instance generate error messages but are excluded in the second instance.

Even more space can be taken off the total because I have 15 kernels installed:

$ ll /boot/vmlinuz* | wc -l
15

The kernel files can be found here:

$ sudo du -sh usr/src lib/modules boot
2.0G    usr/src
4.1G    lib/modules
1.1G    boot

The directories total 7.3 GB but there are other non-kernel files there. In reality the total is 6.5 GB:

rm-kernels total.png

Using this script: How to selectively purge old kernels all at once

Summary

This struck me as odd because I remember reading that 12GB is "comfy"

Taking everything above into account 12 GB is "comfy":

$ sudo du -sh --exclude={home,media,mnt,proc,run,sys,tmp,tmpfs,var,boot,usr/src,lib/modules}
5.6G    .

That said when today 1 TB drives are the normal HDD size and 256 GB or 512 GB is the normal SSD size, comparing 13 GB or 26 GB for a Ubuntu installation seems insignificant.

Personally on a typical 500 GB system I would allocate 400 GB to Windows (includes gaming) and 100 GB to Ubuntu (includes two or three installations).

WinEunuuchs2Unix
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