Re: Mail Server Problem

[Brian Candler <B.Candler at pobox.com>]

On Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at 05:22:02PM -0000, Ayitey Bulley wrote:
> Bruno,
> 
> Actually the default for Solaris I believe is 2k so 1k just doubles the
> number of inodes.

Ah, then we are talking about two different things.

There were plenty of inodes before, so creating more (e.g. one inode per 1k
instead of one inode per 2k) is not the solution.

What I was after was the block size (displayed as 'bsize' by fstyp), which
is 8K. I have access to a Solaris machine at the moment; man newfs says

               -b bsize  The logical block size of the file  sys-
                         tem  in bytes (either 4096 or 8192). The
                         default is 8192. The sun4u  architecture
                         does not support the 4096 block size.

That's what I was talking about. Try it again with '-b 4096'

The strange thing about the Sun filesystem is that there can be quite a lot
of space available as shown by 'df', but it's actually unable to create a
file, because if it wants to write 8K of data it has to sit in a whole
block; it cannot be spread across free fragments in multiple blocks.

I think that what Bruno has done has rebuilt the filesystem with the same
bsize, and has gained some space as a result of it being less fragmented:
172K blocks, or 172*8 = 1.3GB of space.

However, over time it will need defragmenting again and again, which is not
a good way to run a mailserver. So it's probably still worth a newfs with -b
4096.

The option for inodes is:

               -i nbpi   The number  of  bytes  per  inode.  This
                         specifies  the  density of inodes in the
                         file system. The number is divided  into
                         the  total  size  of  the file system to
                         determine the fixed number of inodes  to
                         create.  It  should reflect the expected
                         average size of files in the  file  sys-
                         tem.  If  fewer  inodes  are  desired, a
                         larger number should be used; to  create
                         more  inodes  a smaller number should be
                         given. The default is 2048.

Regards,

Brian.

> 
> 
> --Ayitey
> 
> My mail server problem is now solved. We have used the option of 1k
> (1024bytes), which according to the last mail received from you implies
> that we have 8 times original format. # df -k
> Filesystem            kbytes    used   avail capacity  Mounted on
> /dev/dsk/c0t11d0s2   15683444 14030051 1496559    91%    /home
> #
> 
> And I still have more nbfree now.
> # fstyp -v /dev/dsk/c0t11d0s2 | head -20 | grep nbfree
> nbfree  172405  ndir    43819   nifree  14689593        nffree  272754
> Broken Pipe
> Unknown_fstyp (no matches)
> #
> 
> Thank You very much.
> 
> Bruno.
> 
> 
> -----
> This is the afnog mailing list, managed by Majordomo 1.94.5
> 
> To send a message to this list, e-mail afnog at afnog.org
> To send a request to majordomo, e-mail majordomo at afnog.org and put your
> request in the body of the message (i.e use "help" for help)
> 
> This list is maintained by owner-afnog at afnog.org
> 
> 
> 
> -----
> This is the afnog mailing list, managed by Majordomo 1.94.5
> 
> To send a message to this list, e-mail afnog at afnog.org
> To send a request to majordomo, e-mail majordomo at afnog.org and put
> your request in the body of the message (i.e use "help" for help)
> 
> This list is maintained by owner-afnog at afnog.org
> 
> 

-----
This is the afnog mailing list, managed by Majordomo 1.94.5

To send a message to this list, e-mail afnog at afnog.org
To send a request to majordomo, e-mail majordomo at afnog.org and put
your request in the body of the message (i.e use "help" for help)

This list is maintained by owner-afnog at afnog.org