From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263923AbUEHAl0 (ORCPT ); Fri, 7 May 2004 20:41:26 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263953AbUEHAlZ (ORCPT ); Fri, 7 May 2004 20:41:25 -0400 Received: from madrid10.amenworld.com ([62.193.203.32]:29964 "EHLO madrid10.amenworld.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263923AbUEHAlW (ORCPT ); Fri, 7 May 2004 20:41:22 -0400 Date: Fri, 7 May 2004 20:21:49 +0200 From: DervishD To: Timothy Miller Cc: Christoph Hellwig , Oliver Pitzeier , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Strange Linux behaviour!? Message-ID: <20040507182149.GC380@DervishD> Mail-Followup-To: Timothy Miller , Christoph Hellwig , Oliver Pitzeier , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: <409B4494.5253316B@melbourne.sgi.com> <013001c4340d$e9860470$d50110ac@sbp.uptime.at> <20040507093455.A27829@infradead.org> <409BC67F.4030701@techsource.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit In-Reply-To: <409BC67F.4030701@techsource.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.1i Organization: Pleyades Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hi Timothy :) * Timothy Miller dixit: > >?Have you checked whether you're out of inodes? > What happens when Linux runs out of inodes? It returns ENOSPC on write operations on the filesystem. > Why would it? Because you created lots of dirs and files ;) > Doesn't it create more? EXT2 and EXT3 doesn't, the number of inodes is specified when doing mke2fs and it's fixed. Don't know what happens under other filesystems, but for me doesn't make much sense to create more inodes: inodes themselves occupy disk space, and if you've run out of inodes, you probable are near to run out of disk space too. Moreover, disk structures are a bit complex and adding inodes is not an easy task in most filesystems :? I've been seeing this problem lately on myself. I have a disk to store temporarily backups and large files in general, so I formatted it with ext2 using one inode per megabyte of data. This filesystem usually have 10-50 files, no more, and even with 1/1MB inode ratio, there were more than 10000 inodes. But when I accidentally uncompressed one of the backups in the disk, I run out of inodes *FAST*. I mean, the disk was 80% empty and I didn't have free inodes, but this is not the common case, since usually you will have an inode per 4kB of data, so if you don't have free inodes it will usually mean that your disk space will exhaust soon, too. This is the common case, I think, so it doesn't worth the effort of adding a few more inodes just for making the agony longer ;) Raúl Núñez de Arenas Coronado -- Linux Registered User 88736 http://www.pleyades.net & http://raul.pleyades.net/