Seeing “System information disabled due to load higher than 1.0”? Learn how to identify which partition or directory is consuming disk space and free it up with these diagnostic commands.

Preparation

When logging in through SSH:

SSH login message: system information disabled due to high load

System information disabled due to load higher than 1.0

Walkthrough

GUI version : Space Radar

Space Radar disk usage visualization

Install Space Radar on a client machine. On the server, generate a txt sizes file with du -ak

$ du -ak /var/log /usr | gzip -c > /tmp/sizes.txt.gz

See Space Radar repo

CLI version

Which partition is full?

$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
udev 991316 0 991316 0% /dev
tmpfs 199908 20936 178972 11% /run
/dev/vda1 10287416 9833040 4196 100% /
tmpfs 999528 0 999528 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5120 24 5096 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 999528 0 999528 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
cgmfs 100 0 100 0% /run/cgmanager/fs
tmpfs 199908 0 199908 0% /run/user/1000

Which directory is full?

$ du -h --max-depth=1 / | sort -hr
9,4G /
5,2G /var
2,1G /usr
1,4G /opt
560M /root
158M /lib
57M /boot
49M /home
21M /run
13M /etc
13M /bin
9,9M /sbin
3,9M /lib32
3,1M /tmp
$ du -h --max-depth=2 /home | sort -hr

If you still have some Mb left, ncdu (ncurse disk usage) might help:

$ ncdu
$ ncdu ~
$ sudo ncdu /
# inside ncdu, quit with q
# and go up folder with <backspace>

ncdu ncurses disk usage browser

Common temporary files safe to remove

Delete rotated logs

$ ll /var/log/*.{gz,bz2} # check
$ rm /var/log/*.{gz,bz2} # remove

Going further