FreeBSD 5.4 no inodes left

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Philip Radford wrote:

>Hi All,
>
>I am running FreeBSD 5.4 and have recently received the following message on our box for the /var partiton.
>No inodes left.
>
>I have checked the statistics and there was an apache httpd log which was maxing out the usable space. I have since removed this file and the available space has dropped to over 50%. However I still get the 'no inodes left' message even though I have freed the space.
>
>Does anyone know how I can get the inodes to be freed up on the /var partition.
>  
>
You have *not* run out of space.

A single inode corresponds to a single file or directory, so deleting 
one large file frees precisely one inode which isn't going to last 
long.  (And if the file you deleted was still held open, you won't even 
have freed that inode).

Do a "df -i /var" to see how many inodes are left.  Something has 
created a large *number* of files on /var - they might be 0 bytes each 
and it wouldn't matter.

Try "man inode" for more information.

--Alex