cPanel Disk Space Warning

If you are getting emails like these recently, a possible bug in cPanel is causing core dumps and filling up your disk space.

We have been seeing issues with the latest cPanel updates.  For some reason, the cPanel software is causing a core dump.   These core files take up anywhere between 250-500MB of disk space each.

Since cPanel is often installed on the /usr partition and it is typically small, your /usr partition can quickly reach 100% capacity.

Cleaning up Disk Space

You can find the core files in:

/usr/local/cpanel/base

The name of the core files will follow this format.

core.#

where # is the number of the process that died.

You can safely remove these files.

Fixing the Issue

We’ve only had about 10 cases of this so far, but in each case forcing a cPanel update has fixed the issue.

/scripts/upcp –force

I usually keep an eye on the cPanel forums for updates but have not seen any regarding this issue yet.

cpsrvd.so to blame?

On further analysis, it appears cpsrvd.so is to blame, so this is definitely internal to cPanel itself.

root@server[/usr/local/cpanel/base]# file core.747956
core.747956: ELF 64-bit LSB core file AMD x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), SVR4-style, from 'cpsrvd.so'

Adjusting cPanel Notifications

In the Tweak Settings part of cPanel, you can adjust notifications for certain disk usage and other alerts.    We recommend you have 10% free or at least 500MB for any partition containing cPanel.  If the partition contains other items, like MySQL, you may want to have more space.