As cPanel and Linux became market leader in webhosting, We have seen some daily issues.
Every aged Linux hosting system administrator should have ever heard about Quotaon, a linux native hospedagem application that helps the kernel to manage disk quotas.
As the server is new and empty, you won’t have any problems with quotas. But as it gets crowded, let’s say 350 hosting accounts, some problems start to happen, such as Quotaon causing high loads, I/O latency and consequently some downtime for your users.
A easy way to solve this issue, is to set “Safe quotas” hospedagem to “Off”, under “Tweak settings”. But why would this tiny tool, Quotaon, would cause big trouble? Quotaon runs over your entire hdd and rebuild all the user and home quotas, whenever an user changes its hosting plan. Imagine you have a 400GB harddisk, 60% of space used. Running over all the files (smaller or bigger), will cause some hurt for your system.
Usually, the biggest dir is /var . It carries configuration files, temporary, spool, mysql, and some others. Sysadmins recommend you to mount /var in another partition, with NOQUOTAS option under /etc/fstab. It will disable quotas in /var, and consequently prevent your server from running over /var to rebuild quotas.