inode consumption

Mike Goldman (whig@by.net)
Sat, 13 Feb 1999 21:44:55 -0500

A few days ago, I experienced a server failure which appeared to be due
to exhaustion of resources. Certain daemons which respond from memory
(including those which fork on connection establishment) worked fine,
others which perform file I/O ceased to respond altogether. Login was
impossible. Consequently, I determined that the problem was almost
certainly that the system had run out of file descriptors or inodes.
Unfortunately, there was no way to test the running configuration to
determine its state, and a hard shutdown was necessary.

I'm using kernel 2.2.1, and I immediately (after reboot, fsck etc.)
bumped the file-max and inode-max to 8192 and 16384 respectively in the
/proc/sys. Subsequently, I observed the file-nr and saw no real problem
here (reports 1706 192 8192), probably I can safely drop this back to
the default 4096. However, the inode-state shows 27062 18 1 0 0 0 0,
which seems high. I've now bumped the inode-max up to 32768.
Hopefully, this should prevent a recurrence.

What I would like to know, if possible, is which process(es) are
devouring my inodes. Also, are there any stability issues with
increasing file-max or inode-max beyond some point?

Please cc: me on any response, as I am not presently subscribed to the
kernel list. Thanks very much for any assistance.

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