Cloud Platform

Managing disk storage space

Important

The Infrastructure page is available only for Cloud Next environments with Elastic IP addresses (EIPs) information. If EIPs are not provisioned for your environment, the system does not display this page.

If your Cloud Platform application on Cloud Classic infrastructure uses its set quantity of allocated disk storage or exceeds its total number of allotted inodes, your application’s file system or database will stop working, causing your application to stop working. You can examine your disk storage availability from the command line.

Note

  • Cloud Platform Enterprise subscribers
    Acquia manages your infrastructure for you, including your disk storage allocation. For more information, see the Cloud Platform Enterprise Product Guide.

  • Cloud Platform Professional subscribers
    Use the procedure following this note.

If you are approaching your storage limit, you should increase the amount of storage available.

Additional disk storage may have an additional cost; for details, see About Cloud Platform Billing: Disk storage. In addition, increasing your disk storage allocation will make all sites on your infrastructure unavailable for 30 minutes or even longer (depending on the size of the disk, how many files and how much data you have) while the larger diskvolume is provisioned and your data is transferred from the old disk to the new one. As a rough estimate, the process will take approximately one minute per GB of data on your existing disk, plus approximately five minutes of additional setup time.

To increase your application’s storage allocation:

  1. Sign in to the Cloud Platform user interface, select your application and environment, and click Infrastructure in the left menu.

  2. Click Resize Disk.

  3. Select the amount of storage you want, check the box to confirm that all sites on the infrastructure will be down during the upsizing, and click Upgrade.

Note

You can only increase your storage allocation on the Infrastructure page, and cannot decrease it.

Inode usage in your filesystem

In Unix-style file systems, inodes are data structures that describe files and directories, but do not contain the actual data of the file. The maximum number of inodes—thus the maximum number of files—for your infrastructure is set when Acquia provisions your infrastructure.

In most cases, infrastructure runs out of file space due to a small number of files that consume all available storage space on the disk. However, it is possible to create a large enough number of tiny files that exceed the total number of inodes your infrastructure can support. If this situation occurs, your application will experience data loss and potentially website downtime until the total number of inodes is reduced.

If Acquia Support notifies you of a disk-full issue, you should review both the space used in your filesystem and your inode usage.

Acquia may also provide you with reports similar to the following example to help you determine where to remove files:

Inode usage on [web-0000]:
Filesystem                          Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/xvda1                            640K  222K  419K   35% /
tmpfs                                 471K     1  471K    1% /dev/shm
/dev/xvdb                             979K  320K  659K   33% /mnt
  • Inodes: the total number of inodes available in this region of the filesystem

  • IUsed: the number of inodes in use in this area

  • IFree: the number of additional inodes needed to completely fill this region of the filesystem

  • IUse%: the percentage of available inodes currently in use

  • Mounted on: the path to this region of the filesystem