Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!sci34hub!gary
From: gary@sci34hub.UUCP (Gary Heston)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Cnews wish
Summary: inode shortage? What inode shortage?
Message-ID: <321@sci34hub.UUCP>
Date: 16 Sep 89 01:19:56 GMT
References: <1989Sep14.182604.15992@helios.physics.utoronto.ca>
Lines: 30

[ wishlist about features deleted ]

In article <1989Sep14.182604.15992@helios.physics.utoronto.ca>, sysruth@helios.physics.utoronto.ca (Ruth Milner) writes:

> If you're planning to do it, remember that since news articles tend to
> be small individual files, you are likely to run out of inodes long before
> you run out of space, even if you do some tweaking with the inode
> parameters in mkfs. The exceptions, in my experience anyway, tend to

>  Ruth Milner          UUCP - {uunet,pyramid}!utai!helios.physics!sysruth

I don't find it necessary to "tweak", I just looked at the typical size
of postings and calculated an appropriate value. A "df -t /news" returns
the following:

/news     (/dev/dsk/1s0    ):    95420 blocks    30760 i-nodes
                   total:   304254 blocks   65488 i-nodes

The worst problems I've had was when permissions problems caused batched
files to build up in the /news partition. This caused some of the 
directory entries to get stretched out over 50,000+ inodes, which KILLED
performance. (Expire was taking 6 hours to run, for example; an ls took
5 minutes to come back, and rnews was running all day--this on a 16MHZ
386 Multibus machine I use as a mail/news hub.) The only way to cure it
was to dump everything to tape, recreate the directory, and restore.

-- 
    Gary Heston     { uunet!gary@sci34hub  }    System Mismanager
   SCI Technology, Inc.  OEM Products Department  (i.e., computers)
      Hestons' First Law: I qualify virtually everything I say.