vxfs inode count

[Tin Che Ko]

Recently I noticed that /home has inode count of 87% and the file system is vxfs.

Does vxfs dynamically allocates inodes and
there for reporting 87% is misleading?

Is there a way to allocate more inodes to decrease the inode count?

ITO is configured to pick up inodes over 80% to report.

Please advices. Thanks.

[John Dvorchak]

From my HP performance training manual ever version of vxfs about 2.x has dynamic inode allocation and "cannot run out".

[John Dvorchak]

I really should proof read before I submit:

I appologize for my last responce. Let me try again.

From my HPUX performance training manual:

Every version starting with v-2 "inode allocation is dynamic and cannot run out."

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Vxfs filesystems do indeed allocate inodes on an "as-required" basis with one exception: If the file system was created specifying the maximum number of inodes using mkfs -F vxfs ninode=n where n is a non-zero value. In that case, the maximum number of inodes is fixed.

You can determine this by using mkfs with the -m option.

e.g. mkfs -F vxfs -m /dev/vg05/lvol2


The -m does not create a filesystem but instead display all the options used when an existing filesystem was created. Max mkfs_vxfs for details.

One method to lower the %inode usage would be to create a script to create a herd and temp files and then remove them but the better option --- especially if all the monitored filesystems are vxfs with unlimited inodes (the default) would be to ignore or at least increase the threshold.