ran out of inodes on /var, recommended value?

[Subhro Sankha Kar]

On 10-Jun-2012, at 6:13 AM, illoai at gmail.com wrote:

> On 9 June 2012 18:38, RW <rwmaillists at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> 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 out of date port during a fetch.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.
>> 
> 
> Or, move the portsnap tree to somewhere other than /var
> (see /etc/portsnap.conf for that & such).
> I think that a file-backed md* mounted only when portsnap
> was in use would save on inodes, yeah?

Actually I think that is a very good idea. That is how I have set up my system as well with one difference. I have tons of memory and use a memory based filesystem to store all the in-compile objects.

--
Subhro Sankha Kar
System Administrator
Working and Playing with FreeBSD since 2002