increase number of inodes?

[Wiger van Houten]

On Fri, 19 Aug 2005 19:15:30 +0200, Matthew Dillon  
<dillon at 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 at 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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