Size of AMI Images in AWS/EC2 instances

G

gaudenzio

Hi all,

this is my first message in this wonderful forum. Sorry for my english and sorry if it's not the right section.

I'm quite a beginner in Unix based systems. I'v had in the past my personal VPS with a with a Debian-Nginx-MariaDB system and my personal page and a few projects. Now i'm trying a new, more serious PHP project, and decided to switch to FreeBSD.

I was just wondering why the official, "out-of-the-box" FreeBSD installation in AWS is quite big (3.8Gb) in comparison with other Linux distributions.

Debian and CentOS clean installations in AWS start with about 1-1.5 Gb used disk space.

Is there any "easy" way for a beginner to shrink the base FreeBSD Installation? I already detected that usr/lib/debug alone is 1,46 Gb big.

Or maybe, could we ask for an official "lightweight" AMI as a feature request?

Best regards.
 
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Could it be because FreeBSD included the LLVM Clang compiler by default? These Linux usually don't include any compilers but need to install it separately via a meta-package, e.g: build-essential on Debian.
 
/usr/ports got 1 GB, however, you want to keep this. I don't remember, whether, /usr/src was in the AMI when I did my installation, in case yes, I emptied it. The FreeBSD sources account for 1.3 GB and /usr/src/ can be safely emptied, as long as you don't want to build a custom kernel or custom user land tools on the very machine.

There is a FreeBSD mailing list freebsd-cloud@freebsd.org (https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-cloud) and you might want to send feature requests to this list. Colin Percival, the maintainer of the FreeBSD-AWS-AMI responded once to one of my questions on the said mailing list.
 
Thank you for your answer, obsigna.

There is no /usr/ports directory, and /usr/src/ is empty.

The largest directories I could find so far are:
/usr/lib/debug: 1.5G
/var/db/freebsd-update: 508M
These 2 directories use take alone half of the disk usage.

I think i've read somewhere that I can safely delete the debug folder as long as I don't want to use the debug functions, but I'm not sure.
And I'm afraid I'm not skilled enough to compile a custom AMI without debug.

freebsd-update could be safely emptied according to
forums.freebsd.org

Solved - Is it safe to clean /var/db/freebsd-update/files ?

I've got 107954 files taking up almost 2G of space in the /var/db/freebsd-update/files directory, which I'm assuming are leftovers from performing freebsd-update during the various FreeBSD 10-RC upgrades. Is it safe to remove these? With the ability to rollback an upgrade (using freebsd-update...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
I wanted to make a comparison between FreeBSD 11 and 12, launched a new Instance of FreeBSD 11 and got these quite funny results:

FreeBSD 11:
The FreeBSD 11 AMI size "out-of-the-box" is only 2.4G (1.4G less than FreeBSD 12).
df - h gives:
Code: 
Filesystem         Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/gpt/rootfs    9.7G    2.4G    6.5G    27%    /
devfs              1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev

/usr/lib/debug size is 847M
/var/db/freebsd-update size is 295M

FreeBSD 12:
Again, for comparison purposes, the FreeBSD 12 AMI "out-of-the-box":
df - h gives:
Code: 
Filesystem         Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/gpt/rootfs    9.7G    3.8G    5.1G    43%    /
devfs              1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev

/usr/lib/debug size is 1.5G (650M more than FreeBSD 11)
/var/db/freebsd-update size is 508M (213M more than FreeBSD 11)
 
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