Xref: utzoo news.admin:6487 comp.unix.wizards:17497 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!psuvax1!news From: flee@shire.cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) Newsgroups: news.admin,comp.unix.wizards Subject: Out of inodes. SunOS4.0, gripe. Message-ID: Date: 4 Aug 89 15:44:58 GMT Sender: news@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu Organization: Penn State University Computer Science Lines: 25 Ran out of inodes yesterday on our /usr/spool partition. A painful experience. C News is mostly graceful in the presence of full disks, but does nothing to protect you from running out of inodes. We ran out of inodes because the best we can get from SunOS4.0.3 on these huge NEC disks we have is one inode per 6.25kbytes. If you average less than 6.25kbytes per file you run out of inodes before you run out of disk space. Pretty silly. The reason it's 6.25kbytes per inode is the (historical) maximum inodes per cylinder group is 2048, and cylinder groups are 14mbytes. Cylinder groups are that large because, (a) there are 27 * 67 sectors per cylinder, (b) there are 16 sectors per block, therefore (c) you need 16 cylinders to fit an even number of blocks without wastage. Unworkarounds are (a) decrease block size (SunOS wants at least 8K), (b) increase MAXIPG from 2048 (no kernel source), (c) allow wastage in cylinder groups (ditto). Workarounds? Right now we're expiring news at a (relatively) furious rate. The filesystem is at 65% capacity and using 85% of the inodes. Sigh. -- Felix Lee flee@shire.cs.psu.edu *!psuvax1!flee