TL;DR You need to free-up some space on your server (or computer) or get a bigger HDD (or partition).
Today some of the pages on CSSDeck just stopped showing up. All one could see was a blank white page. Pretty scary!
I checked the pages across Firefox and Chrome to make sure the issue persisted on both, which was true.
Next, I quickly wget one of the webpages that wasn’t showing up and noticed something weird. It was giving me a 500 Internal Server Error. With 500 errors, I would usually suspect something wrong with the Web Server but had no dice with Apache’s /var/log/apache2/access.log or /var/log/apache2/error.log.
Checking the development environment locally, no issues were found. So, I almost guessed that something is wrong with MySQL. I quickly picked one of the SELECT SQL queries from my codebase and executed on the mysql command line on server, and here’s what the output was:
[text]
ERROR 1030 (HY000): Got error 28 from storage engine
[/text]
Wait, what ?! Soon I figured out error code 28 means – “No space left on device”. But why for a SELECT query ? Fetching data should not eat up any extra space, right ? Well, it depends. The data from the query needs to be stored somewhere especially if it has ORDER BY and GROUP BY. So mysql creates a temporary file on the disk as far as I know. Plus, there’s even more to be done like opening a file handle, a connection, etc. You get the idea, right ?
You can check your File System’s disk space usage with df -h. Checking the disk space usage of a file or directory is also simple with du -hs dir/.
So just fix your drive from being out of space. In my case, I simply purged some big old backup directories.
