Re: inode leak 2.2.12+ why??

[Andrea Arcangeli]

On Thu, Jan 11, 2001 at 02:01:58PM -0500, [e-mail] wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The most puzzling thing is happeneing.  I have compiled a vanillat 2.2.18
> kernel with scsi aic7xxx compiled in, 3com network support. (nothing fancy
> no sound, no isdn, video, etc...)
> 
> I installed this kernel on a redhat 5.2 system, it boots in fine, but then
> after some time I get messages saying fork: resource unavailable.  I
> checked the inodes and I was chocked to see the number goingg up and up
> without stopping.  I changed the value of inode-max to a high number, and
> at the same time file-max, but to no avail.  Once it hits that max, it
> will not allow me to do anything but shutdown the power to restart.

Yes, this is a known limitation of the icache (and 2.4.x still can't shrink the
filp pool, infact I'm surprised such pool is still there, I'd kill the filp
poll enterely and I'd use the slab cache for that that should be more efficient
in SMP and it's dynamic, should be just a few liner plus some code removal).

Your mistake is been to enlarge the inode-max, you shouldn't do that.
2.2.19pre7aa1 uses smarter calculations to setup the inode-max and icache hash
size (so you're more likely to get sane values for servers), I suggest to try
it without touching inode-max from its default value and see what happens.

Andrea