Details and Test for System V Inode Bug

[Martin Weitzel]

In article <108 at thor.UUCP> scjones at thor.UUCP (Larry Jones) writes:
[...]
>This is an obscure bug which only occurs under very limited conditions.
>Very busy systems have run for years without encountering it and others
>hit it every other day.  Sites running B news seem to be affected more
>than anyone else, switching to C news reportedly causes the problems to
>go away.  Why this should be so is a complete mystery.

I don't know the details how any of both packages (B and C news) unpack
incomming batches and expire old articles, but I strongly assume that the
answer to the `mystery' can be found here.

Expiring old articles normally deletes some few files from a lot of
directories. The `randomness' of the inodes freed by that more or less
depends on the order in which the articles were originally inserted.
(Note that the inode cache in the superblock is not very big, so that in
a spool directory with a growing number of files, new allocations tend
to be ordered wrt to their inode numbers.)
-- 
Martin Weitzel, email: martin at mwtech.UUCP, voice: 49-(0)6151-6 56 83