[Mailman-Users] know to mkfs /var/spool with a higher inode

[Phil Stracchino]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 12:51:18PM -0400, Bob Puff at NLE wrote:
> >   Yes, real mail admins know to mkfs /var/spool with a higher inode
> >   count than the rest of their systems.  I'll let you guess what
> >   percentage of mail admins actually do.
> > 
> > There are quite a few lists out there running off i486 boxes with
> > small disks.  Some of them have nice bandwidth but have horrible
> > disk IO.
> 
> Ok, I'll byte.  man mkfs tells of no options.  HOWTO?

You usually have to look at mkfs for a specific filesystem (mke2fs on
Linux, newfs on Solaris, etc) to find the low-level options.  All those
filesystems that support it (i.e, forget trying it with mkdosfs or
mkisofs, and it's probably not meaningful on reiserfs or xfs either) say
pretty much the same thing:

       -i bytes-per-inode
              Specify  the  bytes/inode ratio.  mke2fs creates an
              inode for every bytes-per-inode bytes of  space  on
              the  disk.   The  larger the bytes-per-inode ratio,
              the fewer inodes will be created.  This value  gen-
              erally  shouldn't  be smaller than the blocksize of
              the filesystem, since then too many inodes will  be
              made.  Be warned that is not possible to expand the
              number of inodes on a filesystem after it  is  cre-
              ated,  so  be careful decided the correct value for
              this parameter.



-- 
 Linux Now!   ..........Because friends don't let friends use Microsoft.
 phil stracchino   --   the renaissance man   --   mystic zen biker geek
        alaric at babcom.com                halmayne at sourceforge.net
   2000 CBR929RR, 1991 VFR750F3 (foully murdered), 1986 VF500F (sold)