On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, Matthew Hawkins wrote:
> G'day smiley happy people :)
Hmm, that REMinds me of some song...
> I have this problem with 2.1.124, and both .125 pre-patches. It
> seems that a lot of programs are refusing to function as they
> complain about "too many open files" and so forth. Now I know this
> is rubbish as the same programs happen to function fine with 2.0.35,
> and 2.1.119. I can reproduce it with Debian's apt, Netscape
> Navigator 4.06, and XF86_S3.
> Now what I think seems to be the problem is the default setting of
> /proc/sys/fs/inode-max. The documentation from Rik says that this
> setting should be 3-4 times greater than file-max. file-max is of
> course set to 4096 by default, and to my surprise, so is inode-max.
> Increasing inode-max to 16384 seems to get rid of the "too many open
> files" problem.
> What's the story here?
The inode cache was using far too much memory on a lot
of small machines, so the number of inodes cached was
dynamically set on boot dependant on the amount of memory
someone has.
The inode cache does the following things:
- keep track of open files/sockets/pipes/fifos/other stuff
- cache inodes of files on disk as referenced by the dcache
Since the inode cache functions as a slave cache to
the file cache, I guess that your machine already used
all inode cache entries to cache files cached by the
dcache, leaving:
- no free entries
- no possibility of freeing an entry, since that also
has to be done at the dcache level
You seem to have uncovered a bug, raising the number
of cached inodes is a workaround, but you can expect
a fix real soon (if I identified it correctly, I'm
CC:ing some folks in order to check if my suspicion <sp?>
is right)...
cheers,
Rik.
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| Linux memory management tour guide. H.H.vanRiel@phys.uu.nl |
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