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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.cs.su.oz.au!metro!metro!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!solace!nntp.uio.no!news.cais.net!news.ac.net!imci4!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.kei.com!usenet From: ckd@loiosh.kei.com (Christopher Davis) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc Subject: Re: Dispute over number of files Date: 3 May 1996 14:32:09 GMT Organization: Darth Vader School of Personnel Management Lines: 46 Sender: ckd@loiosh.kei.com Message-ID: <w4loj9bzg2.fsf@loiosh.kei.com> References: <4md2k5$ep1@antares.en.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: loiosh.kei.com Mime-Version: 1.0 (generated by tm-edit 7.52) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII In-reply-to: MML Staff's message of 3 May 1996 13:44:37 GMT X-Attribution: ckd MS> == MML Staff <mml@4you.com> MS> I have an account with an Internet presence provider (names will be MS> kept confidential) and I was told I would get 75 Mbytes of disk space MS> with my account when I signed up. [file quota of 7500 files is getting in his way] MS> I need feedback from some BSDI guru's to help settle this dispute. MS> If you can provide factual information about the Unix file system MS> (especially BSDI; if it's different) that supports either my argument MS> or the presence providers, please respond. Post your response rather MS> them email, so that everyone (including the presence provider) can MS> see. Well, there *is* a limit on the number of distinct files that can exist on a filesystem. Each file has to have an inode, and there are only so many inodes created when the filesystem is made. Making more would require them to reformat that filesystem. That part of their argument is true. Except for news drives, it is very rare (in my experience) for a filesystem to run out of inodes under normal usage. The use you describe (many very small files) is, however, the exact kind of use that does it. They claim that "7500 empty files [would use] 75 meg of space". As you note, they're wrong; you claim they'd use 7. That's also wrong. Empty files have only an inode, but take up no data blocks (except for a small amount of space for the directory entry or entries ;-). What I would do is run a "df -i". The default bytes/inode on a BSD/OS 2.1 system (according to the newfs man page) is one per four fragments (by default, fragments are 1K). This means that normally filesystems "expect" files to average at least 4K. See if that filesystem is particularly low on inodes or not--then at least you'll have facts about THAT FILESYSTEM to discuss with them. Maybe they won't remove the file limit, but you might be able to get it increased... I also find it interesting that the accounts appear to be on /usr. If they really expect to have inode problems from users creating small files, I'd expect them to have the users on a separate filesystem which could even be created with parameters tuned for many small files. (For example, when I create a news filesystem, I set the block and fragment sizes differently; when I create a filesystem for storage of large files, I may lower the number of inodes to create more storage space.)