[RndTbl] out of inodes

Trevor Cordes trevor at tecnopolis.ca
Sun Nov 24 16:03:33 CST 2013


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.


More information about the Roundtable mailing list