*BSD News Article 25846


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!sdd.hp.com!decwrl!decwrl!netcomsv!netcomsv!resonex!zenon
From: zenon@resonex.com (Zenon Fortuna)
Subject: Re: out of inodes! - HELP!
Message-ID: <1994Jan10.232541.5820@resonex.com>
Organization: Resonex Inc., Fremont CA
References: <2gk70i$8t@twitch.ns.doe.gov> <2gjv52$gol@homer.cs.mcgill.ca> <2gmrf7$3ik@netbsd08.dn.itg.telecom.com.au>
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 1994 23:25:41 GMT
Lines: 45

In article <2gmrf7$3ik@netbsd08.dn.itg.telecom.com.au> tdwyer@netbsd08.dn.itg.telecom.com.au (Terry Dwyer 619 491 5161) writes:
>To: storm@cs.mcgill.ca (Marc WANDSCHNEIDER)
>Subject: Re: out of inodes! - HELP!
>...
>: James Martin <martinj@havoc.ns.doe.gov> wrote:
>: >
>: >twitch /netbsd: uid101 on /var/spool/news: out of inodes
>: >
>...

>First, by experiment, I found that the standard filesystem (NetBSD-0.8
>anyway) uses 4096 bytes/inode.  This is the reason you run out of
>inodes in a news spool dir.
>
>I found -1 3072 to be very satisfactory for my news spool.
>...
>It is important not to have too many inodes created in the data space, or you
>lose a considerable amount of disk space. ...

Your file system uses probably 128-byte i-nodes (the FFS uses 128b, Minix uses
32b), so "-i 3072" means, that your inode table will be about 1/25th of the disk
whereas "-i 1024" means there would be 1/9th of the disk used for inodes.

If the average file size is above 2k, then the "-i 3072" should be sufficient.
It depends on the news group, however. I think, that "-i 2048" would be safer.

>Another thing you might consider, if you are low on disk space, is to
>reduce the space usable only by root.  This defaults to 10%  I've set 
>mine to 2% with no apparent ill effects.  When you increase the number
>of inodes you will lose disk space, so I found this was necessary for
>my tiny little news spool drive. ...

Probably it is a very good suggestion for the partition intended for a
collection of small files. While decreasing the "minfree" towards 2% would
cause a performance degradation for an averaged file system, the file system
with small files only will suffer very little.

>...
>Now all you have to work out is where to put your news spool while you
>newfs the disk. ;-(
>   _-_|\    Terry Dwyer 	  E-Mail: tdwyer@netbsd08.dn.itg.telecom.com.au

One should have a convenient backup system in any case :).

	-Z.