On Monday 19 March 2018 19:42:36 Nick Koretsky wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Mar 2018 18:28:24 -0700
>
> William Morder <doctor_contendo@...> wrote:
> > > > About a month ago, I had something like 2.2 gb free in my / (sda1)
> > > > partition; then it went down to 1.5, then to 1 gb, then to 800 mb,
> > > > 600, 400, 200, and now I am at about 165 mb, and sometimes it goes
> > > > down to 0. In all this time, I haven't installed anything new, or
> > > > done anything different.
> > >
> > > I may have missed that but it seems no one have asked it in the thread
> > > - did you reboot you system during this time or is it a continuous
> > > uptime?
> >
> > Yes, I did reboot. I probably was rebooting my system every few days,
> > just because my Firefox seems to be interfering with my network
> > connection. And while I was learning the differences in a Debian system
> > (in contrast to Ubuntu), I also rebooted constantly, because I was
> > constantly messing up my system. For the past few months, though, my
> > system has been fairly stable, and I haven't been downloading and
> > installing new packages.
> >
> > Right now the problems are: 1) my vanishing partition, 2) why Firefox
> > messes up my network connection, and 3) minor bugs.
> >
> > Nowadays I might go a week or two without rebooting, unless I end up with
> > no space left on my root partition.
>
> Well, i mean does reboot reclaim that lost space? You see one of a possible
> reason for a "vanished" space are open deleted files. If some daemon
> misbehave with cache or imporper log rotations, etc...

It does reclaim some of the lost space, yes - hence one reason for rebooting, 
when I run out of space - but there is still a creeping issue of space 
disappearing in increments of a couple mb at a time. 

Bill