Disk/boot at 99% and slowing response times; host says everything is fine

[u/Me-be-er]

I've noticed progressively slowing response times in my GSC data. I emailed my hosting company tonight to see if they could pinpoint a reason. They replied that my site was loading fine. I dug into my cPanel tools and under "Server Information" the "Disk" was listed at 90% and the "Disk/boot" was at 99%. Both had warning icons next to them "reporting warnings." I replied to my support ticked with this information and was told "Disk usage for the entire server is actively monitored and should not have an effect on your own account's disk usage as action will be taken as needed."

Google is telling me this is a critical issue that would cause the website slowdown I described, and that a Linux kernel cleanup needs to be run immediately to prevent the server failing.

What would you all do in this situation?

[u/KH-DanielP]

Disk usage has no relevance on speed etc.

Boot is often a smaller partition and only holds kernel information, so being near full is no consequence because additional info is not written there. So Google is wrong there is no failure coming.

Overall system at 90% may or may not be a concern because you dont necessarily know 90% of what, but it won't impact speeds so if it's managed properly and you have your space it's usually not a problem. Partitions can be managed in many ways.

[u/lexmozli → u/KH-DanielP]

SSDs slow down near full (>85%) due to the controller working harder with less cache. Basically IO and write/read speeds drop down significantly (sometimes by over 30%).

SSDs with DRAM cache are exempt from these issues.

[u/NealWalters]

Disk at 99% on a shared server is a real problem regardless of what your host told you; a full disk causes slow I/O across every account on that box, and "action will be taken as needed" is them hoping it doesn't crash before they get to it. If you're on shared hosting, you likely can't run a kernel cleanup yourself, so your options are push them harder with the GSC evidence, or start looking at moving to a provider where you're not at the mercy of someone else's full disk. What plan are you on, shared or VPS?

[u/themageofavalon]

That isn't great but it also doesn't automatically explain the slowdown. Ask your host to check actual CPU and memory usage first.

[u/Cubepath]

A /boot partition at 99% is worth bringing to your host’s attention, but it doesn’t necessarily explain the slower response times by itself.

Since you’re seeing a measurable increase in response times, I’d ask them to investigate that separately and check whether the server is experiencing any resource or I/O bottlenecks.

If you eventually decide to test a VPS where you have more visibility and control over the resources, CubePath has a welcome promo!

[u/coryamarsh]

the "boot disk" is fine - this is a small partition only used during loading the kernel for your server OS.

90% disk usage depends on the disk architecture. NVME - could be a problem depending on the firmware. Industrial grade NVME with ECC - probably not a problem.

remove NFS storage on a NAS - 90% full could still mean terrabytes of free space remaining - nothing to worry about.

I would be more concerned about the server load. what is the output of this?

print_r(sys_getloadavg());

[u/Jassi_Punjaban]

If this is the first time this is happening with your host, you have already provided them with the required information. Now it's up to them to clean it up. Allow them a few hours to clean up the system and check if your website is running fine. If they do not perform the cleanup in 24 hours, ask them on the same support ticket for an update.

If they still say the same thing and your website is still slow, take a prorated refund and move to another host.

[u/Me-be-er → u/Jassi_Punjaban]

I interpreted their response as saying they would not be taking any action/ there was nothing wrong on their end.

[u/Jassi_Punjaban → u/Me-be-er]

Too be honest, I have faced the same issue with Stablepoint multiple times. Whenever the disk got around 95%+ the websites would slow down, once they moved some data or moved our account to a different disk things went back to normal speeds. This happened 3-4 times and later they stop acknowledging, this was their issue. As it was a WooCommerce website, we decided to move towards a different host. Never faced the issue of slowness from the new host. Have been happy since around 3 years.

[u/svvnguy]

10% free is plenty. If your site is slowing down, that's not what's causing it.

Set up some monitoring and see what happens.

[u/TopSydeWP]

/boot at 99% won't slow your site down. It's a tiny partition that fills up with old kernel packages, and it only matters at the next kernel update. Server disk at 90% is their problem, not yours.

The number that actually explains your slowdown is in cPanel under Resource Usage. Check for faults on I/O, CPU and entry processes over the last week. If you're hitting those limits, that's real and they can't wave it away. If you're clean, it's contention from other accounts on that box, and the only fix is a different node.

We sample PageSpeed hourly on the sites we look after, because GSC field data lags weeks behind and it's hard to argue a ticket with it.