Mongodb gives “Can't take a write lock > while out of disk space” error with plenty of space

Question

I have mongodb running on a linux server with 90% disk usage (as confirmed by df). Every operation is causing the following error:

db.dropDatabase() { "ok" : 0, "errmsg" : "Can't take a write lock while out of disk space", "code" : 14031 }

'df -k' shows:

Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda1      16380820 14622652   1657920  90% /
devtmpfs         2015972       56   2015916   1% /dev
tmpfs            2024984        0   2024984   0% /dev/shm

There seems to be plenty of disk space. Is it possible that the database is corrupted? The disk had originally ran out of disk space but then I deleted many files and cleared 10% but the error persists.

Can anyone recommend what next steps to take?

Thanks

Answer 1

So it turns out that mongodb requires as much space as the size of the database you are dealing with. This is crazy. What I had to do, is to clear as much disk space as the size of the db.