Out of disk space
November 6, 2026
I run a handful of virtual servers hosting a hodgepodge of personal web apps, including this blog.
Last night, I wrote a small feature for a meal-planning app and pushed the code to production. The deployment came to an abrupt halt.
Error 38: Out of disk space
It’s an error I hadn’t seen in a long time.
We’ve grown used to the idea of infinite storage. Services like S3 have made storage so abundant and easy to use that we rarely think about its limits. The same goes for compute. Spin up another instance, add more capacity, and carry on.
But this abundance comes at a cost. And it has made us somewhat indifferent to the resources our apps consume.
Running applications on modest hardware is a useful reminder that resources are finite. Good software engineering isn’t just about what an application can do, but how little it needs to do it.
Build smaller, lighter applications. Run them on modest machines. Make better use of what you have.
And save a little money along the way.
P.S. I ran a quick disk-usage command to find the 20 largest files and directories:
sudo du -h / | sort -rh | head -n 20
The culprit? An old Docker installation I was no longer using.