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Alex R
Asked: 2009-12-12 18:14:26 +0800 CST

Why am I getting "write queue file: No space left on device" from postfix when there's 5GB of free space on disk?

  • 772

It started happening today... all of a sudden, no apparent reason!

Here's the output from df:

assp:~# df -k
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/simfs             6291456   1378384   4913072  22% /
tmpfs                  8202680         0   8202680   0% /lib/init/rw
tmpfs                  8202680         0   8202680   0% /dev/shm

assp:~# df -i
Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/simfs           55781934   83005 55698929    1% /
tmpfs                2050670       2 2050668    1% /lib/init/rw
tmpfs                2050670       1 2050669    1% /dev/shm

assp:~# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/simfs            6.0G  1.4G  4.7G  22% /
tmpfs                 7.9G     0  7.9G   0% /lib/init/rw
tmpfs                 7.9G     0  7.9G   0% /dev/shm

Here's an actual entry from /var/log/mail.warn:

Dec 11 17:55:37 assp postfix/smtpd[30614]: warning: not enough free space in mail queue: 0 bytes < 1.5*message size limit
Dec 11 17:55:37 assp postfix/cleanup[30617]: warning: 4361D850D54: write queue file: No space left on device

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linux

7 Answers

  1. You might want to run a df-i to see if you have used up all your inodes.

    You can have available storage space, and not have the ability to add files.

    cache:~# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             132G   68G   58G  55% /
cache:~# df -i
Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sda1            17514496 13543293 3971203   78% /

    You also might want to check to see if you have any quotas set (repquota -va).

    • 6

  2. 5% (iirc) of space is reserved for root, might be your filesystem is "full" for normal users. You can get more info with e.g.

    tune2fs -l /dev/sda1

    • 3

  3. Which device is full? Perhaps there's plenty of space on one partition, but another (e.g. /tmp) is full? Do a df -h and see if any of the partitions are close to full, and then figure out if postfix uses that partition.

    • 1

  4. Just curious, but is your queue > 2GB in size? I'm wondering if it's running into a filesystem size limit or a hard limit for postfix. I know that Apache dies when it hits 2GB on the log file (or at least it did at one point)

    • 0

  5. What is the value of message_size_limit which is set?

    http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#queue_minfree is a possible cause for this response.

    • 0

  6. From http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg07849.html

    Postfix tries to avoid the situation where the system is 100% full and it can no longer get work done.

    To completely avoid such conditions, Postfix would have to reserve an amount of space the size of (message size limit * inbound concurrency). Unfortunately, this is not practical in many cases, so it settles for 1.5 times the message size limit.

    This means that although you've got 5GB free - your settings are such that you need more.

    • 0

  7. I have same problem on OpenVZ virtual machine. Space is temporarily taken by backup.

    • 0