# /var/tmp/httpd-logs is chewing up storage due to health checks

**URL:** https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/var-tmp-httpd-logs-is-chewing-up-storage-due-to-health-checks/4938
**Category:** Get Help
**Tags:** question
**Created:** [August 6, 2026, 7:40pm UTC](https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/var-tmp-httpd-logs-is-chewing-up-storage-due-to-health-checks/4938 "2026-08-06T19:40:40Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![robert\_freeman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/65b543/32.png) [@robert\_freeman](https://discourse.openondemand.org/u/robert_freeman)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2026, 7:40pm UTC](https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/var-tmp-httpd-logs-is-chewing-up-storage-due-to-health-checks/4938/1 "2026-08-06T19:40:40Z")

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Greetings. Please forgive any newbie-posting errors.

We recently discovered that our httpd log directory is filling up due to entries (in both error and access logs) for healthchecker entries: we are in AWS and an ELB health check runs periodically. We don’t believe we’ve made any changes on the frequency of checks (knowingly), and have increased the interval between checks.

Has anyone else seen this issue? Any thoughts on what might be happening here?

Aside, we’re using OnDemand v4.0.11 on Amazon Linux2 (for not much longer); and running ParallelCluster 3.7.2.

Thanks for reading and considering this post.

Best,  
Bob

Bob Freeman, PhD  
Sr. RCD Facilitator  
Harvard University Research Computing

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### Author: ![jeff.ohrstrom](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex015/user_avatar/discourse.openondemand.org/jeff.ohrstrom/32/136_2.png) [@jeff.ohrstrom](https://discourse.openondemand.org/u/jeff.ohrstrom)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2026, 9:42pm UTC](https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/var-tmp-httpd-logs-is-chewing-up-storage-due-to-health-checks/4938/2 "2026-08-06T21:42:07Z")

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Hi and welcome!

I guess you could double check who’s making the health checks by checking the ip. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s something else you’re unaware of?

Beyond that, you can use the `logrotate` program to rotate logs based off of size, not only time. So if you set an aggressive crontab entry (like every 5 minutes or similar) then `logrotate` can check your logs can rotate them based on current size of the file. That may help alleviate the issue if you can’t pinpoint or stop whoever is making the requests.

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### Author: ![robert\_freeman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/65b543/32.png) [@robert\_freeman](https://discourse.openondemand.org/u/robert_freeman)
#### Post date: [August 10, 2026, 3:39pm UTC](https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/var-tmp-httpd-logs-is-chewing-up-storage-due-to-health-checks/4938/3 "2026-08-10T15:39:55Z")

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Thanks, Jeff, for the suggestion on this.

Turns out that the ELB healthcheck was only one of the “issues”. For some reason, the lua info messages have increased significantly, though the usage of our cluster has not increased similarly. So we’re wondering what has changed, and how. Perhaps a flag had been changed somewhere when performing our 2x/month maintenance and patching of systems (AL2 OS, ParallelCluster service, etc). If not that, then is there a deeper problem somewhere that is generating more log spam?

For now, we’re going to change the LUA logging to WARN instead of INFO, in hopes this will lessen the chattiness in the logs. But we’d prefer to lessen that # of log entries without having to ‘silence’ the logging by moving to WARN.

Any thoughts on your end?

Thx again,  
b

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### Author: ![jeff.ohrstrom](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex015/user_avatar/discourse.openondemand.org/jeff.ohrstrom/32/136_2.png) [@jeff.ohrstrom](https://discourse.openondemand.org/u/jeff.ohrstrom)
#### Post date: [August 10, 2026, 4:10pm UTC](https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/var-tmp-httpd-logs-is-chewing-up-storage-due-to-health-checks/4938/4 "2026-08-10T16:10:04Z")

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> [@robert\_freeman](#):
>
> For now, we’re going to change the LUA logging to WARN instead of INFO, in hopes this will lessen the chattiness in the logs. But we’d prefer to lessen that # of log entries without having to ‘silence’ the logging by moving to WARN.

Not sure how/if LUA is involved here in the healthcheck URL. What are the log lines that are most prevalent?

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### Author: ![robert\_freeman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/65b543/32.png) [@robert\_freeman](https://discourse.openondemand.org/u/robert_freeman)
#### Post date: [August 12, 2026, 5:08pm UTC](https://discourse.openondemand.org/t/var-tmp-httpd-logs-is-chewing-up-storage-due-to-health-checks/4938/5 "2026-08-12T17:08:43Z")

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Oh, sorry. The LUA messages are unrelated to health checks. I’ll have to ask to see what is happening in there.
