Fixing Quotaon Issues In Cpanel/linux Hospedagem Servers

By Author: Gustavo Carvalho
Total Articles: 3764
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As cPanel became market leader in the hosting market, We have seen some daily issues.

Every experienced Linux hosting system administrator should have ever heard about Quotaon, a linux common hospedagem application that helps kernel to manage user quotas.

As the box is not crowded, you won't have major problems with quotas. But as it gets crowded, let's say 350 hosting accounts, some problems will start to happen, such as Quotaon causing very high loads, I/O latency and consequently some big slowdowns for your users.

A simple way to fix this issue, is to set "Safe quotas" hospedagem to "Off", under WHM "Tweak settings". But why would this simple tool, Quotaon, would cause such trouble? Quotaon runs over all your harddisk and rebuild all the quotas, whenever an user changes his hosting plan. Imagine you have a 500GB harddisk, 60% of disk space used. Running over all the files (smaller or bigger), will cause a colapse for your server.

Usually, the most crowded dir is /var . It carries configuration files, temp files, email messages, mysql, and some others. Specialists recommend you to mount /var in ...
... a separate partition, with NOQUOTAS directive under /etc/fstab. This will disable quotas under /var, and then prevent linux from searching over /var to rebuild quotas.