ran out of inodes on /var, recommended value?

[RW]

On Sat, 09 Jun 2012 07:22:50 -0600
Gary Aitken wrote:

> I reconfigured my ssd filesystem with the /var partition of size
> 512M.  Unfortunately, something in portsnap or the ports tree in
> general uses a boatload of small files, and i ran out of inodes.  Can
> anyone recommend an appropriate size for the newfs -i value?  1024?
> less?

portsnap needs roughly one file per port plus one for each
out of date port during a fetch. There are 23658 ports.

In FreeBSD 9 the fragment size increased, halving the default number of
inodes. With only 32k inodes it's possible to run out with portsnap
alone. You can probably get away with the old default of 64k (-i
8192), or perhaps 128k (-i 4096). Check how many files you have outside
of portsnap and do the arithmetic.