Re: [gentoo-user] ext4 inode limit reached

[Alex Schuster]

Joseph writes:

> On 12/12/11 12:15, Daniel Troeder wrote:
> >Hello :)
> >
> >I have an ext4-filesystem that contains /usr/src, the /usr/portage and
> >/var/cache/edb. It previously also contained /var/db/pkg, but I had to
> >move that some weeks ago, because the fs was "full". Now it's "full"
> >again, though it has free blocks. But no inodes are left:
> >
> >$ fsck -vf /dev/sda5
> >[..]
> >  655360 inodes used (100.00%)
> >[..]
> >
> >$ find /gentoo -xdev | wc -l
> >655338
> >
> >That's really disappointing. I was using reiser3fs and XFS before, and
> >they didn't have that kind of limitation... Uhm... not meant as a rant
> >- I like ext4 - that's why I'm moving (almost?) everything to it...
> >
> >Is there any way to raise the number of inodes without using
> >$ mkfs.ext4 -N BIGNUM
> >
> >Thank you,
> >Daniel
>
> That is scary. I just install new HD with 2TB capacity and ext4 that is
> 2% full and:
> $ find /home/joseph/ -xdev | wc -l
> shows: 169977  that is 26% full.

No, that is 26% of the number of total inodes _Daniel_ has on his small
partition. Yours is bigger, so you have more inodes. My largest partition
has 724G, and 46 million inodes. Use df -i to see how many you have.

> So will run out of inodes before I run out of hard disk space :-/ that
> is not good. If other filesystems don't have these kind of limitation
> I'll be switching.

Having too few inodes has been a problem for me in the past. But that was
either a tiny partition for the portage tree, which has so many small
files. Or the partition where I back up my /var partition with
rdiff-backup, so it also has lots of files, and with each backup the same
amount gets added. If you intend to place unusually many files on a
partition, check how many inodes mkfs has created, and re-create the file
system using the -N option, giving it a somewhat larger number.

	Wonko