Inode usage

Hi!

I have a lot of free inodes on my xfs-partitions and was wondering about what impact this has on performance or memory?

Here is output from 'df':
df -ih
Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 5,1M 129K 5,0M 3% /
/dev/hda3 31M 54K 31M 1% /home

df -h

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2             5,1G  2,8G  2,4G  55% /

/dev/hda3 31G 18G 13G 59% /home

With xfs_growfs -m I can adjust the amount of free inodes, but it seems I can't change it for the root-partition, why is that a problem?

Kind regards
Stein

None. The number of free inodes is a made up number. ;)

XFS dynamically allocates and frees inodes, so the number of free inodes is determined by working out how many inodes could be allocated in the remaining free space you have. It's a theoretical maximum....

Works for me....

Cheers,

Dave.

Dave Chinner
Principal Engineer
SGI Australian Software Group

That's for normal usage.
Well, David don't forget what you tell me some time ago about xfs_repair

In terms of inode count, I generally use the rule that for every 10million inodes you need a gigabyte of RAM for repair - you needed about 500MB for 6million inodes.

The inode count also affects xfsdump/xfsrestore operations but I don't know the details. There was a huge improvement in performances for partial dump with xfsprogs-2.8.16 IIRC.

Regards,
Daniele P.

Sorry. I was really blind. I didn't read "free".

Apologies,
Daniele P.