kernel inode usage

[kenshoomy]

Hi  everyone

I recently installed BMC monitoring system on my linux guests.

and i got an alert about high kernel inode usage (its 99% on some servers)

anybody know what it means and how can i fix it?

im new around so im not sure if i should even ask here but i really need help

Thanks!

[EdWilts]

This is a problem in your guests and you should follow up with whoever is supporting your Linux clients.

The fix depends on what file systems you're using.  A short term fix is to reduce the number of files on your file system.

If you run out of inodes (which is the basically the number of files you can create on the file system), you will not be able to create new files.

[Shakaal]

Hi,

Got the following infromation from link http://eloquence.marxmeier.com/sdb/html/linux_limits.html, hope that this helps

Number of open files

Default values:

NR_INODE 3072   /* this should be bigger than NR_FILE */
NR_FILE 1024    /* this can well be larger on a larger system */

This can be set dynamically through /proc/sys/kernel/file-max and /proc/sys/kernel/inode-max

Extract from /usr/src/linux-2.1.103/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt:

file-max and file-nr

The kernel allocates filehandles dynamically up to a limit specified by file-max.

The value in file-max denotes the maximum number of file- handles that the Linux kernel will allocate. When you get lots of error messages about running out of file handles, you might want to increase this limit.

The three values in file-nr denote the number of allocated file handles, the number of used file handles and the maximum number of file handles. When the allocated filehandles come close to the maximum, but the number of actually used ones is far behind, you've encountered a peak in your filehandle usage and you don't need to increase the maximum.

inode-max and inode-state

As with filehandles, the kernel allocates the inode structures up to a limit specified by inode-max.

The value in inode-max denotes the maximum number of inode handlers. This value should be 3-4 times larger than the value in file-max, since stdin, stdout and network sockets also need an inode struct to handle them. When you regularly run out of inodes, you need to increase this value.

The file inode-nr contains two values, nr_inodes and nr_free_inodes. Nr_inodes stands for the number of inodes the system has allocated, this can be slightly more than inode-max because Linux allocates them one pageful at a time. Nr_free_inodes represents the number of free inodes

Regards

[BharatR]

Check the Application Process how much % it is Using

[kenshoomy]

Hi

Thanks for all the replies!

the problem is that its not ordinary file system inode usage..

for example when im doing df -i all filesystems are at 9% max

i didnt understand the sentence about the application process...

anyway i guess its really something in the linux OS and not related to the fact that its a VM

Thanks for the help