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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.ysu.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.intercenter.net!rbickers From: rbickers@intercenter.net (Ron Bickers) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc Subject: Re: Dispute over number of files Date: 3 May 1996 15:06:30 GMT Organization: The Internet Center - Raleigh, NC Lines: 39 Message-ID: <4md7dm$j3l@galileo.intercenter.net> References: <4md2k5$ep1@antares.en.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: atlantis.intercenter.net X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] MML Staff (mml@4you.com) wrote: : I have an account with an Internet presence provider (names : will be kept confidential) and I was told I would get : 75 Mbytes of disk space with my account when I signed up. : Recently I was not able to create any more files and doing a : "quota -v" revealed that they had also imposed a quota on the : number of files I could create. Here is what it looked like: : Disk quotas for user [deleted] (uid [deleted]): : : Filesystem blocks quota limit grace files quota limit grace : /usr 35815 84480 76800 7499 8250 7500 : I am creating a lot of HTML files which tend to be small : (usually under 1K) and so have not used up a lot of disk : blocks (each block is 1K). I also try to keep the size : of the images small so they will transfer more quickly. First, I know you don't have to reformat the drive to take off the file quotas and I know they aren't "linked" to the byte quotas. There is a file limit per file system. Each file takes an inode and when you run out of inodes, you can't create any more files on the system even if you have a lot more disk space available. A 'df -i' will show the inodes used/available. If the file system is used only for thousands and thousands of 1K files, you'll probably run into an inode problem. I've only heard of this problem with news spool drives but I'm sure there are other situations where it's a problem. Reformatting the file system with different parameters than the default could allow for more inodes and should have been done if they suspected the files would be nothing but many small ones. Check out 'df -i' and see if the % of inodes used is grossly less than the % of disk space used on the file system in question. If it is, they're probably over cautious and you're better off finding another provider that knows what they're doing. Ron.