Disk usage viewer does not match cPanel

[Matt]

In cPanel on the homepage, in the left-hand column, you will see a "Disk Space Usage" statistic. You will also notice an icon in cpanel called "disk usage viewer"

Sometimes, (usually) these two items will not be the same number.

There are 2 reasons that we know of for this problem currently, however, the disk usage calculation on the cPanel main page is the correct figure in all cases.

The most common for the "disk usage viewer" inaccuracies is that your cPanel is caching old quota information and you recently deleted unneeded files. The way to clear this cache is to use the option in the disk usage viewer called (as of this writing)
"clear file usage cache"

The other option is to navigate to the top level of your site "/" and delete the file called .cpanel_ducache which you can see using the file manager inside of your control panel.

The second most common problem is due to sites that have an excessive number of files installed on them. The disk usage view does not account for file system overhead like the cPanel main page does, and because of that, tiny bits of overhead data can really start to add up.

Directly quoted from cPanel support:

This discrepancy exists because the disk usage viewer does not account for file system overhead ( inode and block sizes ). Your file system is formatted with 4k block sizes, which can add up on filesystems with a large number of files.

The usage indicated on the main page in cPanel accounts for all usage in or outside of that user's home directory, and does account for filesystem
overhead. The total for that usage is pulled from a quote report for that user.

Unfortunately at this time there is no way to circumvent this behavior.
However, I will make mention of this to or developers, and see if we can offer an alternate solution, or possibly a more verbose description of what usage is summarized in the disk usage feature.

What does this mean to you? it means basically the current disk usage view should be considered a "ballpark" estimate and is a good place to look for general ideas of where disk usage is being most consumed, and that the ACTUAL total disk usage being consumed by your account is listed on the cpanel main page.

With any luck we can get an improved disk usage viewer out of cpanel soon.