Had a weird issue today where I had 1GB free disk space on / but programs were bombing out with "no more space" errors. I deleted big files to make 1.6GB free. Still the same error!
Turns out (thanks Adam) I had run out of inodes. That's pretty wild as I tweak my fs's to ensure that won't happen based on my usage patterns.
In the end, it was Opera that had created 2 *million* temp files in its user cache dir!
Which leads me to the question: why didn't Linux (or I guess extX) reserve whatever% inodes for root, as it does for actual disk space? Has no one ever thought of this? It seems rather silly that a user program could bring down the whole system by using up all the inodes.
I just wanted to check other peoples' thoughts before I contemplate making a bugzilla on this.