I want my i-nodes

[Herb Weiner]

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After running smoothly for almost two weeks, I ran out of i-nodes in
my /usr/spool/news partition.  (There was still plenty of disk space.)
That seemed strange, I thought, since I had formatted the partition
with "newfs -i 1024", which should have provided plenty of i-nodes.

WRONG! When I checked the numbers, I actually had approximately one
i-node for every 4K bytes.

It turns out that newfs apparently has a limit of 2048 i-nodes per
cylinder group.  With a high capacity hard drive (lots of sectors
per track and lots of tracks per cylinder), the limit of 2048 becomes
a significant limitation.

I reformatted my partition with only 8 cylinders per cylinder group
(the default is 16 cylinders per group), effectively doubling the
number of available i-nodes, but this is a hard limit.  newfs will
not allow me to reduce the number of cylinders per group below 8.

Now I wonder whether there is a better way.  Is a blocksize of 4096
(the minimum allowable with BSD file systems on A/UX) wasteful for
a news spool partition?  A SYS V file system doesn't appear to be
the solution, since it has a limit of 65,500 i-nodes -- far too low.

I look forward to hearing how others have solved this problem.

Herb Weiner (herbw at wiskit.pdx.com)