SUMMARY(no): vnode table is full message in kern.log

From: Charles Vachon <cvachon2_at_mrn.gouv.qc.ca>
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2000 14:20:54 -0400

Original post:
>
> 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.

I had only only reply to this, which still leaves some questions
unanswered.

Thanks to Nikola Milutinovic <Nikola.Milutinovic_at_ev.co.yu> who mentions
that this error message might be caused by fragmentation on the file
system, in addition to the "out of entries in the open-files table"
which it is intended to report.

--
===============================================
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 27 2000 - 18:22:06 NZST

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