Re: [PLUG] Reclaiming inodes

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 9:01 AM, Thomas Delrue <delrue.thomas@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, September 28, 2017 3:34:08 PM EDT Joe Rosato wrote:
>>I doubt you actually have this problem, it is possible, but my guess is
>>there are a lot of tiny files somewhere... Maybe spool because mail issue??
>>Find the directory and you will find your problem.
>
> This was exactly what was going on. cron was trying to send mail (MAILTO=""
> was NOT part of my crontab file) and thus these things were accumulating in my
> /var/spool/exim4 folder)

Yeah, unintended small files would certainly cause this problem.  I
didn't even think to question whether you actually needed all those
inodes in the first place.

In general though anytime you're creating a relatively small ext4
filesystem you should probably pause to think about how many inodes
you will need though.  I wouldn't create them just in case something
like this happens (sooner or later you'd run out even if you allocated
all the space to inodes).  However, inode starvation can happen on
smallish ext4 filesystems with the default settings if you aren't
careful.

If you read the manpage and check your defaults in /etc you'll see
that ext4 has reasonable defaults based on the size of the filesystem,
but if your use case isn't normal, or if your filesystem size is
towards the boundary of the settings changes, you might want to adjust
things.  That might also mean allocating fewer inodes - if you had a
multimedia storage filesystem you might want far fewer inodes per byte
of storage.

-- 
Rich
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