Roy Britten wrote, On 04/11/14 09:00:
> What I learned yesterday: it's possible to run out of inode space
> before you run out of disk space. In my case, in a system with lots of
> old versions in /usr/src it eventually became impossible to create
> files, even with plenty of disk space available.
>
> df -h showed adequate available space
> df -i showed IFree of (almost) 0
>

Yes - its hard to do though... you must have an imperial hogshead of
tiny files ?   Or some change control system that makes lots of files?

Remember its one Inode per file, and if the file is small enough it is
stored inside the inode rather than using another block. 256 bytes is
the default size of an inode.

Was your disk filesystem  ext2 or ext3 or ext4? 

Some installers have options for nntp or news being lots of small files,
therefore lots of inodes
conversely they also offer choices like "bigfiles" so less space is lost
to inodes... if you're only storing a couple hundred 700 Mbyte files
then millions of inodes is wasting disk space, but this comes from the
days when disk space was expensive.


You can't change the number of inodes without formatting the drive - so
rsync or tar your files to somewhere else, re-run mkfs.ext4 on the
partition, and copy your stuff back.


However if you used LVM then you can add more inodes, but only at the
same ratio.


root@fs:~# df -i /junk
Filesystem              Inodes IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/junk 6553600  3364 6550236    1% /junk

Added 1 GB of extents to this Logical Volume

root@fs:~# df -i /junk
Filesystem              Inodes IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/junk 6619136  3364 6615772    1% /junk


-- 
CF
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