Thank you to those who promply answered my question.
Long story short: The file format in v5.x has been changed to fix the
BMT exhaustion problem, but if I upgrade the OS, I would need to backup,
recreate domains, and restore from backup to change the AdvFs domains
into the new file format.
I was also given the follwing suggestions:
- use UFS instead of AdvFs if our data requires so many small file.
This will be put under consideration.
- use the defragment utility. I know about this fix, but unfortuantely,
with our engineers competing for limited CPU and I/O resources, it will
not go well to defragment a 200+ GB domain for HOURS in a cron job.
[original question]
> On some of our machines (all running 4.0F) we run into the BMT
> Exhaustion problem where we get an "out of space" error before acutally
> using up all the disk space in an AdvFs domain. To make matters worse,
> we do not have an AdvFs utilities license to used the addvol -x -p
> utilities to expand the volumes. So I often need to recreate the
> domains to accomodate our growing datasets.
>
> I have Mr. Steven Hancock's book "Tru64 UNIX File System Administration
> Handbook". It says that systems wich constantly create and delete small
> files will often suffer from BMT Exhaustion problems. I was told by one
> of our engineers that they store and delete 17 million tiny files on
> some directories. The book also says that after Tru64 4.0, BMT has been
> "redisigned to eliminate the possibility of exhaustion".
>
> So I've priced both AdvFs Utilities license, which is VERY very
> expensive; and Tru64 5.1 (whatever is the latest version) OS upgrade,
> which is also expensive, but not as much as the utilities license. If I
> simply upgrade the OS, will this end our problems? Although in doing
> so, we may break a lot of our software. On the other hand the cost of
> the utilities license is almost prohibitive.
--
Kevin Dea
UNIX System Administrator
Alpine Electronics Research of America
Received on Mon Aug 20 2001 - 20:29:12 NZST