vnode table is full message in kern.log

From: Charles Vachon <cvachon2_at_mrn.gouv.qc.ca>
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 11:53:45 -0400

Hello admins,

Lately, the following message began appearing from time to time on a
DU4.0D host's console and also gets logged by syslogd:

kern.log:Apr 19 03:48:09 hagar vmunix: vnode table is full

I browsed summaries on this mailing list , and found some messages
related to this condition. I also did a little RTFM regarding this
before posting :-)

It seems that the table holding pointers to open files fills on host
"hagar". The 4.0D System configuration and tuning manual indicates that
the size of this table is controlled by the max-vnodes attribute of the
VFS subsystem. vnode-related values for this host, as printed by
sysconfig are:

    nvnode = 1428
    max-vnodes = 80961
    min-free-vnodes = 1428
    vnode-age = 120
    vnode-deallocation-enable = 1

The maximum value (used on systems with 32 Mb memory or more)"is the
number of vnodes that 5 percent of the available memory can contain".
This seems to be exact, as our various hosts exhibit values of
max-vnodes roughly proportionate to their installed RAM. Documentation
also states that "Increasing the value of the max-vnodes or maxusers
attribute increases the maximum number ofvnodes, which increases the
number of open files." My experience is that changing maxusers (and,
yes, rebooting the host) has no effect on the max-vnodes attribute.
Could the manual be wrong on this? Also, I'm a little skeptical that all
of 80,000+ vnodes are consumed at some point on this host. A lsof
usually shows less than 5000 open files, far less that the apparent
maximum.

Any clues or comments on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

--
===============================================
Charles Vachon tel: (418) 627-6355 x2760
  email: cvachon2_at_mrn.gouv.qc.ca
  Administrateur de système
  FRCQ/Ministère des Ressources
  Naturelles du Québec
===============================================
Received on Thu Apr 20 2000 - 15:54:40 NZST

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