Freeing Inodes

[Andrew Kaplan]

I am running a 10.20 system and it is critically low on inodes. Aside from rebooting the system, is there a way to free up inodes on the fly? Thanks.

[Dave Olker]

Hi Andrew,

Are you referring to the "ninode" kernel parameter or some other parameter? How have you determined that you are running low on inodes? Are you using the Glance screen? Is there some other symptom you're seeing that leads you to believe you have an inode shortage? Some error message when launching an application or process?

The ninode parameter is used to track HFS inodes. Are your filesystems using HFS or do most of them use VxFS?

In answer to your specific question, I don't know of any way to "free up" inodes aside from stopping any applications that are using these inode references. If you are going to have to reboot your system anyway, you might want to take this opportunity to rebuild your kernel with a higher value for ninode, if that is the parameter you're concerned about.

Regards,

Dave

[Kent Ostby]

You cannot fix a problem related to ninode on the fly under 10.20.

You can increase the parm size of ninode or maxusers and rebuild the kernel and reboot.

If its on the actual filesystem, you will need to back up your data, remake the filesystem with a higher inode density and restore files.

[DCE]

If the system is HFS, the only way that I know of to free up inodes other than rebooting is deleting closed files.

If the files cannot be deleted, then you will have to change the ninode parameter, regen the kernel, and reboot the system.

[Raj D.]

Hi Andrew ,

Check with # sar -v 5 5 , the usage.
Also you can check with :
# glance -t

You can try increasing the ninode parameter.
It will need a reboot.

hth,
Raj.