On Tuesday 20 March 2018 21:44:47 Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 06:46:48PM -0700, William Morder wrote:
> > On Tuesday 20 March 2018 11:29:17 deloptes wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > > have you looked at ~/.xsession-errors ?
>
> I also suggested that a couple of days ago. It is important to check the
> root user's home directory as well as your standard home directory.
>
> > Well, the file itself is 170.8 kb. As to the content, there are a lot of
> > items, but it all seems to be ordinary processes. Should I be looking for
> > something in particular?
>
> If its only 170 kB, then it's not the problem you're looking for. The
> scenario I was referring to is when you get thousands of X errors a
> second, and the .xsession-errors file explodes out to hundreds of
> megabytes or gigabytes in size.
>
> Here's a thought... if you disconnect the internet, does the root
> partition stop filling up? Give it, say, 10 minutes and see if it stops
> growing, and then starts again when you turn the connection back on.
>
Sometimes it keeps filling up. I tend to disconnect from the Internet when I 
don't need the connection for anything, due to issues with the network 
itself. 

> Does your ISP offer usage stats? If so, are they unusual?

The Internet is provided by my apartment building, so our ISP offers nothing; 
the network is also pretty insecure (the password could be cracked by a child 
in about 15 minutes), and we constantly have issues with the network. The 
access point is in the hallway outside my door, yet iwconfig shows that my 
signal level is hardly ever above 50/100 for signal level. 
>
> My thinking is to discover whether or not this unusual disk usage is
> purely internal, or whether it has something to do with the internet
> access: either data being downloaded, or uploaded, or both.
>
> Not necessarily something malicious. Maybe you've got a rogue
> (misconfigured) program downloading updates over and over and over
> again, thousands of times.

Only clamav tends to download updates a lot, and slows down everything. 

Anyway, I think I'm just going to surrender to necessity and reinstall; but 
not before I resize my root partition. 

Bill