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Ran out of inodes on myth partition
http://forums.linhes.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=17523		 Page 1 of 1
Author:  tzoom84 [ Thu Jan 03, 2008 10:07 pm ]
Post subject:  Ran out of inodes on myth partition
I was copying over some files and got this error:

Quote:
cp: cannot create directory '[DIRECTORY]' : No space left on device


After some googling, I found it could be an inode problem. And sure enough, using "df -i", I get this:

Quote:
$ df -i
Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 1224000 171648 1052352 15% /
/dev/hda3 73472 73472 0 100% /myth
tmpfs 124935 3 124932 1% /dev/shm
/dev/hdc 0 0 0 - /cdrom


... I ran out of free inodes on the /myth partition. What I find interesting is that for a 280gb partition (/myth), there are very few inodes, 6% of the Linux OS partition.

Is there a way to increase the number of inodes per partition? From Wikipedia, "The maximum number of inodes s set when the file system is created. If V is the volume size in bytes, then the default number of inodes is given by V/2^13."

If this is the case, I am not sure how the inodes can be adjusted. Any ideas?

Note: This partition is a clone of a previous, smaller, partition (using dd), and the partition was resized using resize2fs. Could this be part of the issue?
Author:  tjc [ Thu Jan 03, 2008 10:37 pm ]
Post subject: 
I don't know that they can be adjusted, the size is set when the partition is formatted/FS is created and the superblocks are laid out. Maybe something like GPartEd can do it...

The /myth partition is specifically formatted with "sparse super blocks" as it is intended to have a relatively small number of relatively large video files. The case I've seen folks run into problems with this tend to be when they have lots and lots of much smaller music files.

Here you can see a more typical usage pattern, where even with sparse superblocks, a disk 90% full of ~300, 30-120 minute long, video recordings only uses a small fraction of the inodes.

Code:
root@black2:~/scripts# df -i
Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/hda1            2100032  101789 1998243    5% /
/dev/mapper/vg-myth   114080    3426  110654    4% /myth
tmpfs                  64170       3   64167    1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1             119264    3381  115883    3% /backup
root@black2:~/scripts# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1              20G  2.3G   17G  13% /
/dev/mapper/vg-myth   446G  401G   46G  90% /myth
tmpfs                 251M  4.0K  251M   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1             466G  365G  102G  79% /backup


How the heck did you get 73472 files on /myth anyway? That'd mean you've got something like 70K music files, assuming ~3 minutes per song thats ~150 solid non-stop 24 hour days of music...
Author:  tzoom84 [ Fri Jan 04, 2008 7:33 am ]
Post subject: 
Thanks for the info. I never knew the myth partition was optimized for large files like that. Man, those developers think of everything! Now that I know this, I think I'd rather reduce my /myth partition a bit and make a separate partition specifically for miscellaneous files.

I read a bit that GParted can be used to resize partitions, both reduce and expand. However I ran into an error using it last night, ""Error: File System has an incompatible feature enabled". I heard this is pretty common with ext3 filesystems. Perhaps I'll try setting up LVM as I've heard its easier to add and take away space that way. I'll play around with these and report back.

...As for how I have so many files. It's a mix of music, ebooks, Frets On Fire, and a collection of old games. Each old game unzipped has a whole lot of files. :)
Author:  tzoom84 [ Fri Jan 04, 2008 11:09 am ]
Post subject: 
Correction to before: I was getting the error with parted, not GParted.

Update:

I was able to VERY easily repartition the drive using GParted (installed default with KDE on my machine). Very easy interface to use. Fortunately, this was a possibility since I only had about 40% of my /myth partition full at the time of shrinking.

Unsing GParted, simply:
1. shrunk my /myth partition.
2. Created a new partition with the unallocated space.
3. Created an ext3 filesystem on it
4. Applied changes (took ~20 mins for a 300gb partition)
5. Updated my /etc/fstab for the new mount.
6. Verified inodes with "df -i"

Now plenty of inodes in the new partition. :]
Author:  mjl [ Sat Jan 26, 2008 8:26 pm ]
Post subject: 
Hi,

Funny you should run into this issue as I was just pondering that very same. I don't have a lot of music files however do have many pictures and they kill inodes just as quickly.

The part I was trying to figure is just how much to set aside for non video items as music and images. I am thinking ~10 gig would be a generous size. What did you settle on for the added partition?

Mike
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