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Back in the early 90's when I was in college and everyone had email accounts on shared unix servers that they'd log into, a sysadmin friend would oftentimes not

Back in the early 90's when I was in college and everyone had email accounts on shared unix servers that they'd log into, a sysadmin friend would oftentimes notice that the disk would be getting close to full. He'd start a process that would slowly fill up disk space, and wait as all the other logged in users would realize they could no longer save files - then they'd frantically start to delete files they no longer needed. After a while he'd cancel his process and the system would have a lot more space.

rgj 12y ago
The other way around: In 1995 I worked in a Dutch research institute where the file server was always almost out of disk space. Whenever some space freed up, my manager used to create something he called a 'balloon': a directory with 20 files of 5 MB each (which was huge back then). If the disk was full and we needed space, he just removed one of those files and we could quickly write our files.
- Gravityloss 12y ago
  tragedy of the commons... or is it comedy?
  - cunac 12y ago
    it is more that people today take for granted huge amount of resources at their disposal you become VERY creative when hard times hit :-)
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      You only become creative when faced with limitations.
      - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
        Is boredom a limitation?
- emeraldd 12y ago
  Poor mans superuser reserved space :)
- makomk 12y ago
  I think Second Life had something similar early on, way before I started playing. It let users build stuff out of basic shapes called prims, and the number of prims in each region was limited for performance reasons. So users started to set up "prim banks" of unnecessary prims they could delete when they wanted to build something. The developers had to add quotas in the end.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- hibikir 12y ago
  I have worked in buildings low on meeting space where middle managers would do something similar, but with meeting rooms. You can always find a meeting if you abuse the system to 'claim' one room as your own for enough hours of the week. Hoarding in a situation of some scarcity is common behavior, and makes the problem worse. You can't assume people will behave the same way when a resource's availability changes. And this is why we go from plentiful to very scarce so very quickly, with very little in between
dale-cooper 12y ago
Kind of related to this, I find it interesting that the ext file systems by default reserves a percentage of the space for the root user.
- kjs3 12y ago
  All native Unix filesystems do this (well...at least since V7; I don't remember about V6 or before). It's so the root user (and the kernel, and applications running as root, e.g. logging) would have some amount of disk space to work with if needed. Much more important in the days when typical servers had less than 100MB of disk. The default is (usually) 5%. In these more bountiful days of multi-terabyte disks I generally knock that down to 1%.

rgj 12y ago

The other way around: In 1995 I worked in a Dutch research institute where the file server was always almost out of disk space. Whenever some space freed up, my manager used to create something he called a 'balloon': a directory with 20 files of 5 MB each (which was huge back then). If the disk was full and we needed space, he just removed one of those files and we could quickly write our files.

Gravityloss 12y ago
tragedy of the commons... or is it comedy?
- cunac 12y ago
  it is more that people today take for granted huge amount of resources at their disposal you become VERY creative when hard times hit :-)
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    You only become creative when faced with limitations.
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      Is boredom a limitation?
emeraldd 12y ago
Poor mans superuser reserved space :)
makomk 12y ago
I think Second Life had something similar early on, way before I started playing. It let users build stuff out of basic shapes called prims, and the number of prims in each region was limited for performance reasons. So users started to set up "prim banks" of unnecessary prims they could delete when they wanted to build something. The developers had to add quotas in the end.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
hibikir 12y ago
I have worked in buildings low on meeting space where middle managers would do something similar, but with meeting rooms. You can always find a meeting if you abuse the system to 'claim' one room as your own for enough hours of the week. Hoarding in a situation of some scarcity is common behavior, and makes the problem worse. You can't assume people will behave the same way when a resource's availability changes. And this is why we go from plentiful to very scarce so very quickly, with very little in between

dale-cooper 12y ago

Kind of related to this, I find it interesting that the ext file systems by default reserves a percentage of the space for the root user.

kjs3 12y ago
All native Unix filesystems do this (well...at least since V7; I don't remember about V6 or before). It's so the root user (and the kernel, and applications running as root, e.g. logging) would have some amount of disk space to work with if needed. Much more important in the days when typical servers had less than 100MB of disk. The default is (usually) 5%. In these more bountiful days of multi-terabyte disks I generally knock that down to 1%.