mjhjmtu

I need to get the size of multiple folders (with subfolders and several files) and update a database, in order to limit the users upload to my server. This process must be done periodically, in the shortest time possible.

I created a crontab to execute this procedure each 30 minutes, but would be great if this time interval could be reduced to 10 minutes or less. I have no idea how much resources this process is taking from server. I have a humble VPS with 1 GB RAM, 1 CPU, Debian 8, Apache2 and MariaDB.

My question is: how to calculate server resources consumption of this process, in order to estimate which time interval to use?

Btw, here is the PHP function I am using to get folder (and subfolders) size:

function dirSize($dir) awk 'BEGINsum=0 sum=sum+$1 END print sum'", 'r');
 $size = intval(fgets($cmd, 80));
 pclose($cmd);
 return $size;

Thanks!

EDIT:

I received a good suggestion from @meuh to update the database each time a file is uploaded or deleted, adding or subtracting the single file size. I'd like to know, in terms of resources consumption, if this is a better approach. Thanks!

You could try the du command:

du - estimate file space usage

Example:

$ du -d 0 -h Documents/
3.2M Documents/

The du command has lots of options, you could even pass it all the directories at once and get a total of the disk usage (check man du for more info).

To find the time taken (in a practical way), you could prepend time to it:

$ time du -d 0 -h Documents/
3.2M Documents/

real 0m0.004s
user 0m0.002s
sys 0m0.001s

This time likely varies with the amount of files and folders in a directory.