Re: Ext3 File System "Too many files" with snort

[Andreas Dilger <adilger@clusterfs.com>]

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On Jul 08, 2004  17:51 +0000, jmerkey@comcast.net wrote:
> On a Linux 2.4.21 system running snort with a very large organization
> (30,000 +) workstations I am seeing a "too many files" mesage from ext3
> which results in snort dying and rolling our of memory.  Is there a way
> to specifiy a larger number of inode entries dynamically when creating
> an Ext3 file system which gets around this limitation.  In theory, a file
> system should not create a limitation on how many files it can contain,
> but I understand that inode base FS's have this limitation.

Do you create a subdirectory for every user?  If yes, then there
is a limit of 32000 subdirectories in a single directory for Linux.
It is possible to bump this up to 65000 or so (include/linux/ext3_fs.h
EXT3_LINK_MAX), but not more, because of i_nlink size limits.  If you have
so many entries in a single directory I'd also suggest the htree patches
to ext3 (I can send you patches if you want) to improve performance,
but they are not strictly required.

If you are actually running out of inodes, then you can use "-i" or "-N"
to mke2fs to increase the number of inodes in a new filesystem.  Since
this defaults to 1 inode per 8kB of space, it seems unlikely that you
would run out of inodes before blocks unless you have lots of small files
(maildir perhaps?  even then "modern" emails usually average > 8kB in size
because of HTML crap, lots of headers, attachments, etc).

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/
http://members.shaw.ca/adilger/             http://members.shaw.ca/golinux/


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