*BSD News Article 67578


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From: ckd@loiosh.kei.com (Christopher Davis)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc
Subject: Re: Dispute over number of files
Date: 3 May 1996 14:32:09 GMT
Organization: Darth Vader School of Personnel Management
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In-reply-to: MML Staff's message of 3 May 1996 13:44:37 GMT
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MS> == MML Staff <mml@4you.com>

 MS> I have an account with an Internet presence provider (names will be
 MS> kept confidential) and I was told I would get 75 Mbytes of disk space
 MS> with my account when I signed up.

[file quota of 7500 files is getting in his way]

 MS> I need feedback from some BSDI guru's to help settle this dispute.
 MS> If you can provide factual information about the Unix file system
 MS> (especially BSDI; if it's different) that supports either my argument
 MS> or the presence providers, please respond.  Post your response rather
 MS> them email, so that everyone (including the presence provider) can
 MS> see.

Well, there *is* a limit on the number of distinct files that can exist on
a filesystem.  Each file has to have an inode, and there are only so many
inodes created when the filesystem is made.  Making more would require
them to reformat that filesystem.  That part of their argument is true.

Except for news drives, it is very rare (in my experience) for a
filesystem to run out of inodes under normal usage.  The use you describe
(many very small files) is, however, the exact kind of use that does it.

They claim that "7500 empty files [would use] 75 meg of space".  As you
note, they're wrong; you claim they'd use 7.  That's also wrong.  Empty
files have only an inode, but take up no data blocks (except for a small
amount of space for the directory entry or entries ;-).

What I would do is run a "df -i".  The default bytes/inode on a BSD/OS 2.1
system (according to the newfs man page) is one per four fragments (by
default, fragments are 1K).  This means that normally filesystems "expect"
files to average at least 4K.  See if that filesystem is particularly low
on inodes or not--then at least you'll have facts about THAT FILESYSTEM to
discuss with them.  Maybe they won't remove the file limit, but you might
be able to get it increased...

I also find it interesting that the accounts appear to be on /usr.  If
they really expect to have inode problems from users creating small files,
I'd expect them to have the users on a separate filesystem which could
even be created with parameters tuned for many small files.

(For example, when I create a news filesystem, I set the block and
fragment sizes differently; when I create a filesystem for storage of
large files, I may lower the number of inodes to create more storage
space.)