Docker was Hungry!

Two days ago Docker just decided it was really hungry and began to eat up a lot of disk space. Finally I noticed because some container complained about having no disk space left to run a shell command. 0 bytes to be specific.

Hmmm.

Shortly after other programs complained about disk space and some of them stopped working. together with Sheogorath we investigated the problem and he found out that the storage driver aufs I was using could cause problems - as mentioned on stackoverflow.

I’m running arch-based Manjaro linux so I looked up the arch wiki pages on the topic and configured my docker installation to use overlay2 instead. Was it really that easy? Of course not.

Actually I first issued the command $ df -h to get something like this:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
dev             5,9G     0  5,9G   0% /dev
run             5,9G  1,7M  5,9G   1% /run
/dev/sda2       221G  221G  0,0G 100% /
tmpfs           5,9G  153M  5,7G   3% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5,9G     0  5,9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           5,9G   44M  5,8G   1% /tmp
/dev/sda1       300M  256K  300M   1% /boot/efi
tmpfs           1,2G   60K  1,2G   1% /run/user/1000

Then I typed $ du -sbh /var/lib/docker/aufs which gave me 114 GB /var/lib/docker/aufs/ as a result and there it was - the hungry space eater!

I removed docker and remaining files, installed it again and configured it to use overlay2.