Centova Cast is incorrectly reporting disk usage and/or suspending clients

Question:

Why does the disk space consumption reported by Centova Cast for a stream appear to be much greater than the size of the media (MP3s, etc.) uploaded for that stream?

Answer:

By default, Centova Cast's disk quota includes all files and subdirectories in the account's directory under vhosts/ -- this includes logs, configuration files, and so-on, just like a traditional UNIX quota.

So for example, if the media for the account is consuming 500MB, and 75MB of logs exist, then the total disk space usage for the account will be 575MB.

Centova Cast rotates the log files automatically every 12 hours, retaining a total of about 48 hours worth of log data at any given time. If the log file sizes are impacting your users' ability to store media (and/or resulting in undesired suspensions), you may wish to increase your quotas by the average size of your users' log directories to compensate.

Can I exclude non-media files from the quota?

Yes, as of Centova Cast v2.2.2, configuration and log files can be excluded from the disk quotas by adding the following setting to /home/centovacast/system/config.php (or updating it if it already exists):

define('QUOTA_SPOOL_ONLY',true);

This forces Centova Cast to include only the contents of the /home/centovacast/vhosts/USERNAME/var/spool/ directory in the quota, thereby ignoring any configuration files, log files, and other administrative files not uploaded by the user.

NOTE: This article is for Centova Cast v2 only; an alternate version exists for Centova Cast v3.