Michael Mansour wrote: > Hi, > > I've built two new SL4.4 servers with /var an LV of 2Gb size and ext3. > > After running through some server testing, I found I quickly ran out of inodes > on /var with 64% of the filesystem used but 100% of inodes used. > > df -i shows: > > 262144 256844 5300 98% /var > > I've been using Linux now for 14 years and this is the first time I've ran out > of inodes. > > Using up inodes is indicative of creating too many small/tiny files (logs and mail spools). Decreasing and adjusting the blocksize with 'mke2fs' & reserved blocks with 'tune2fs' may help, but could slow performance if you store many large files there also (/var/cache/yum). ReiserFS is reportedly more efficient for lots of small files & can coexist with other file systems in different partitions. I've run out of inodes when things went haywire... acquiring too much data, unlinked open files which are not deallocated, restoring a bad backup with directory link loops, or perhaps some logging in verbose/debug mode? IIRC, it is easy to get samba & sendmail to do that. There are ways to optimize a FS for Data Acquisition of small files, but it requires a FS planning and a new format. If it is an LVM partition, simply expand it by adding more space until you determine what is creating so many small files (lsof, find . -inum, ls -il... or perhaps disk quotas & 'quotacheck' can help). "Use a 1Kb block size if you have many small files. For large partitions, 4Kb blocks are fine." http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/appendix.html#fragmentation Linux Filesystems - http://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/sect_03_01.html IOzone FS Benchmarks - http://www.iozone.org/ http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ ReiserFS - http://www.namesys.com/ Ext3 FS -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3 Inodes - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inode - HTH Art@JAX