Core Dumps
Today I noticed that my disk space usage on my web host was much higher than what it should have been. As soon as I opened my ftp program to browse through my files I found the problem. In my home directory there were tons of core.##### files (where # is some number). Each one was roughly 45MB and in total they were eating up about 2GB of space. I don’t know why they were generated, but I do know how. Core dumps occur when some program crashes. The core files are more or less an image of what was in memory at the time of the crash. These files are generated mostly for debugging purposes and (should be) safe to delete. If you are unsure of whether or not you can delete them, try renaming them and wait to see if anything explodes.
If these files are continuously being generated, its most likely a signal that something is crashing on a regular basis, but otherwise it may just be a rare occurrence. I’ve read that these files can be caused by WordPress and Drupal so if it becomes a problem you may want to look into that.
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