Re: Writing a GNOME mail client.

[Nathan Clegg <nathan islanddata com>]

Not everyone uses Linux.  One of our 4 gig partitions on the Sun at my
office ran out of inodes when actual space was at 65% capacity.  We deal
with a lot of small files and it can really be a problem.

> Inodes in Linux are 32 bits long.  If your machine had 1024 users on it,
> they would each have to have over 4 million files before they overloaded
> an Ext2 filesystem's inode limit.  Before you hit that, you hit other
> limits, like the fact that to exhaust the inodes, you'd have to fill a
> 4TB disk with 1-block files.  (Assumes 1024 bytes per block.  For 4096
> byte blocks, you'd need a 16TB disk before you'd hit the wall.)
> 
> On a typical system with a 9GB disk for the users and around 1000 users
> (~9MB for each user), each user would be able to have about 10,000
> files.  That assumes that all files are under 1K each.  If that's not
> the case, you'd add another disk (and thus several million more inodes)
> before you ran out of inodes.


----------------------------------
Nathan Clegg
 nathan@islanddata.com