I have a perl script which monitors several windows network share drive usages. It currently monitors the free space of several network drives using the cygwin df command. I'd like to add the individual drive usages as well. When I use the
du -s | grep total
command, it takes for ever. I need to look at the shared drive usages because there are several network drives that are shared from a single drive on the server. Thus, filling one network drive fills them all (yes I know, not the best solution, not my choice).
So, I'd like to know if there is a quicker way to get the folder usage that doesn't take for ever.
1) The problem possibly lies in the fact that they are network drives - local du is acceptably fast in most cases. Are you doing du on the exact server where the disk is housed? If not, try to approach the problem from a different angle - run an agent on every server hosting the drives which calculates the local du summaries and then report the totals to a central process (either IPC or heck, by writing a report into a file on that same share filesystem).
2) If one of the drives is taking a significantly larger share of space (on average) than the rest of them, you can optimize by doing du on all but the "biggest" one and then calculate the biggest one by subtracting the sum of others from df results
3) Also, to be perfectly honest, it sounds like a suboptimal solution from design standpoint - while you indicated that it's not your choice, I'd strongly recommend that you post a question on how you can improve the design within the parameters you were given (to ServerFault website, not SO)