Re: increase number of inodes?

["Wiger van Houten" <Wiger@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 19 Aug 2005 19:15:30 +0200, Matthew Dillon  
<dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> :Don't know whether I should report this here, or in Bugs, but here it  
> goes.
> :
> :I installed the latest ISO a few days ago. Because I wanted to help
> :testing pkgsrc, I cvs-upped the pkg-src tree. I think after about 90%,  
> the
> :filesystem ran out of inodes.
> :I know there is no 'non destructive' way of doing this, so maybe it's an
> :idea to increase the number of inodes by default on new installations.
> :( It was a small partition (guess it was about 500/600 MB), but maybe
> :other people run into the same problems. )
> :
> :Good idea/Bad idea?
> :
> :Regards,
> :
> :Wiger van Houten
> :
> :--
> :Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/
>
>     Well, the defaults are pretty good as they stand but they are not
>     designed for squeezing large numbers of files onto fairly small
>     partitions.  If you wanted to make newfs smarter you could have it
>     drop back to 1K/8K for filesystems less then, say, 2GB, or have it
>     mess with the default bytes-per-inode parameter based on the size
>     of the partition, but it would be a poor heuristic at best.
>
> 					-Matt
> 					Matthew Dillon
> 					<dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

And changing the block size to such a low value will probably drastically  
decrease performance...

Just out of curiosity: is it difficult to implement a 'dynamic inode  
allocation', such that inodes get created when they are needed?
I read that, for example, HP's VxFS V2 filesystem implements this  
(http://docs.hp.com/en/B3929-90011/ch02s04.html ),

This would make file-system tuning unnecessary:
* if you need lots of inodes (e.g. mail server), then you have them (and  
small block size)
* if you don't need a lot of inodes, your block size will remain big  
enough for good performance

(off course, people running mail servers etc. should know what they're  
doing, but it's a good selling point ;) ).

Wiger

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