What determines inode limits on a 11.11v1 system

[Dan Deck]

There was a question raised by one of our customers indicating they were concerned about running out of inodes. Their application creates many small files and thus will eventually use a great many inodes.

What is the limiter on this? Is there one?
How do you determine what it is right now?

[Yashwant]

refer following link

http://forums12.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1209408631753+28353475&threadId=986353

[Tim Nelson]

Depends on what type of filesystem.

HFS calculated at newfs time.
VXFS unlimited.

Also:
kmtune|grep ninodes for hfs
vx_ninode is typically set to dynamic ( calcuated at kernel boot time )

[Dan Deck]

The system is using Online JFS V.3.3

I kind of found part of my answer, that the allocation is dynamic, and mkfs_vxfs man page specifies the default as unlimited inodes. But there must be some limit or am I wrong here.

[skt_skt]

check the i node usage by
#sar -v 3 3

16:14:22 text-sz ov proc-sz ov inod-sz ov file-sz ov
16:14:25 N/A N/A 570/29988 0 2503/89580 0 2049/1048586 0
16:14:28 N/A N/A 570/29988 0 2503/89580 0 2049/1048586 0
16:14:31 N/A N/A 570/29988 0 2503/89580 0 2049/1048586 0


#[/etc/default] kmtune|grep -i inod
ninode 89580 - 89580

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi Dan:

If largefiles are enabled for the VxFS filesystem, you may exceed the non-largefile limit of about 8 million inodes.

See Dietmar's comments (in particular) in this thread:

http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447626+1209413501102+28353475&threadId=18346

Regards!

...JRF...

[Bill Hassell]

You'll usually run out of disk space before you run out of inodes with VxFS filesystems. Your customer is referring to HFS filesystems such as /stand where all inodes are created with newfs. VxFS creates inodes as needed. If you have a single filesystem with millions and millions of files, I would be a lot more concerned about performance issues and backup problems.

NOTE: ninode has nothing to do with filesystem limits. ninode is actually an in-core cache to improve performance with frequently accessed files. It does not really get full as older inodes are replaced with newer inode structures.