Recently we have had several servers run out of hard drive space causing inaccessibility and crashing. On further investigation the hard drive was full so many operations were complaining. The hard drive was being consumed by a very large file within the /var/lib/mysql directory called ibtmp1.ibtmp1 is a temporary working file for MySQL. When you turn the MySQL server off and on again the file is deleted and the server runs again without issue until the file becomes too large again.After some quick research we found that adding or editing a few settings in the MySQL configuration allows you to limit the size of this file and prevent this issue from reoccurring.Open the mysqld.cnf file. The location of our mysqld.cnf was in /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.conf. According to the file you can also copy this configuration to /etc/mysql/my.cnf. Our my.cnf just had an include to the mysqld.cnf file.The file should have some sections like:[mysqld_safe][mysqld]There should be a section for InnoDB settings. If not, it is fine to add these configuration settings at the bottom of the file.Here is the configuration variable:innodb_temp_data_file_path = ibtmp1:12M:autoextend:max:1GThis value can be tweaked based on your server setup and needs but these are the settings we used for our server to set the file to start at 12 MB and limit it to 1 GB.While setting this we also set a few other variables for optimisation:innodb_buffer_pool_size=2048Minnodb_log_file_size=25Minnodb_log_buffer_size=80M