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Diskusage Explorer

Content of folders

Tool Availability

This tool is currently only available on Narval.

You can get a breakdown by folder of how the disk space is being consumed in your /home, /scratch and /project spaces. That information is currently updated once a day and is stored in an SQLite format for fast access.

Here is how to explore your disk consumption, using the example of /project space def-professor as the particular directory to investigate.

ncurse user interface

Choose a /project space you have access to and want to analyze; for the purpose of this discussion we will use def-professor.

diskusage_explorer /project/def-professor

This command loads a browser that shows the resources consumed by all files under any directory tree.

Type c to toggle between consumed disk space and the number of files, q or <esc> to quit and h for help.

If you are only interested in a subdirectory of this /project space and do not want to navigate the whole tree in the ncurse user interface, use:

diskusage_explorer /project/def-professor/subdirectory/

A complete manual page is available with the man duc command.

Graphical user interface

Performance Considerations

When the login node is especially busy or if you have an especially large number of files in your /project space, the graphical interface mode can be slow and choppy. For a better experience, you can read the section below to run diskusage_explorer on your own machine.

Recommended Use

We recommend the use of the standard text-based ncurse mode on our cluster login nodes, but diskusage_explorer does also include a nice graphical user interface (GUI).

First, make sure that you are connected to the cluster in such a way that SSH is capable of correctly displaying GUI applications. You can then use a graphical interface by means of the command:

duc gui -d /project/.duc_databases/def-professor.sqlite  /project/def-professor

You can navigate the folders with the mouse and still type c to toggle between the size of the files and the number of files.

Browse faster on your own machine

First, install the diskusage_explorer software on your local machine and then, still on your local machine, download the SQLite file from your cluster and run duc.

rsync -v --progress username@beluga.calculcanada.ca:/project/.duc_databases/def-professor.sqlite  .
duc gui -d ./def-professor.sqlite  /project/def-professor

This immediately leads to a smoother and more satisfying browsing experience.