Memory shortage

[lindum]

Although my Pi is running well, I'm slowly running out of memory. The micro sd card is filling up and I'm not sure what happens when it does.

I've got some spare USB sticks (16 & 32gb) that I can use, but I don't know how to get the Pi to use those instead of continuing to use the sd card.

Is there a way of making the USB stick the default when the Pi wants to save something in memory.

Thanks a lot.

Lindum.

My apologies if this doesn't come under the correct heading, but it seemed to me to be too technical to put in general.

[DougieLawson]

Have you expanded the filesystem to fill the whole SDCard?

What's it filling up with? Logs? *.deb package files?

You can move the rootfs to a USB device but that won't stop the junk being collected.

[RaTTuS]

does
df -h
show it being full

also
sudo du / | sort -n
may help

[lindum]

For a moment there I thought Jason Statham was replying to my post. LOL

I bet you get that all the time, Dougie.

Well it seems I've still got 3gb left on the micro sd card which which I expanded when I first flashed the image, but sooner or later that's going to disappear and as I want to make the first Pi (B) into a server, I think its a good idea to make sure there's plenty of space should it become an internet sensation. (I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here)

As the 3 16gb USB sticks that are connected at the moment, haven't shown up yet, so I expect they need mounting, but I'm not sure how to do that.

Thank you both for replying.

Michael.
(Lindum)

[DougieLawson]

For a moment there I thought Jason Statham was replying to my post. LOL

That's completely unlikely, since I haven't the first faintest clue who he might be.

If you mount stuff you'd have to decided in advance which part of the filesystem you're going to move on a directory by directory basis also that has to be done before you attempt to use it. It would then be on a one directory per partition and a monster pain in the tail.

One option is to move the whole root filesystem from the SDCard to a USB device, there's plenty of tutorials out there to do that.

The fastest and dirtiest way to get some space back is
sudo apt-get purge wolfram*
sudo rm -R /var/log/*gz
sudo rm /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb

I think you'll get a surprise at how much space you win with that.

[InsideJob]

Instead of manually clearing out the cache of downloaded packages

apt-get clean

if you "man apt-get"

clean
clean clears out the local repository of retrieved package files. It removes everything but the lock file from
/var/cache/apt/archives/ and /var/cache/apt/archives/partial/.

[jamesh]

For a moment there I thought Jason Statham was replying to my post. LOL

That's completely unlikely, since I haven't the first faintest clue who he might be.

He's an Eben Upton lookalike.

[DougieLawson]

For a moment there I thought Jason Statham was replying to my post. LOL

That's completely unlikely, since I haven't the first faintest clue who he might be.

He's an Eben Upton lookalike.

In that case does that make me into an Eben look-alike?

[drgeoff]

I don't know which of the three to have the most sympathy for.

[DougieLawson]

I don't know which of the three to have the most sympathy for.

I have the perfect face for radio, you should have seen my old passport/driving licence photo. That was seriously ugly.