what are gnodes?

[Ross Parker]

In article <2915 at decuac.DEC.COM>, jeff at artud2.enet.dec.com (Jeff
Finkelstein) writes:
> In article <821 at larry.sal.wisc.edu> jwp at larry.sal.wisc.edu (Jeffrey W
Percival) writes:
> >We often get the message "out of gnodes" in our news partition
> >on our Ultrix microvaxen.  I read up on the Unix file system,
> >and learned the basics of blocks and inodes and such, but uncovered
> >no reference to "gnodes".
> >
> >where are these described, and how do I manipulate them to prevent
> >usenet news from giving us so much grief?
> 
> The gnode is the in memory data structure that defines the inode
> information. It actually contains more information than the inode
> itself, particularly relating to the ULTRIX file system. See the
> file /usr/include/sys/gnode.h for more information.
> 
> Regarding the problem, increase the number of inodes in the filesystem
> that you have your news files going to (or decrease the number of
> files). 
> 
> BTW - can you send a description of the filesystem to me for future
> reference?
> 
> -jeff
> 
> --
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Jeff Finkelstein		Internet:   jeff at artud2.enet.dec.com
> ULTRIX Support			UUCP:       ...!decuac!artud2!jeff

The problem may actually be that you're running into the *system* limit
on gnodes, rather than the individual filesystem's inode limit (depends
on where, and under what circumstances the error message is appearing).

To check which it is, do a 'pstat -T'. You'll see something similar to:

waters$ pstat -T
 206/ 590       files
 258/ 432       gnodes
 107/ 276       processes
  39/  37/  76  active/reclaimable/total texts
 142/ 334       00k swap

here, 258 out of a possible 432 in-core gnodes are allocated. If your
allocated number of gnodes is much closer to your maximum than mine is,
you can fix this by rebuilding and installing a kernel with a larger
limit. The easiest way to do this is to increase the 'maxusers' parameter.
I have maxusers set to '32' on all of our systems regardless of what the
license limit is. This, for us, is mandatory else we run out of gnodes
really fast!

Hope this helps!

Ross Parker				parker at mpre.mpr.ca
(604)293-5495				uunet!ubc-cs!mpre!parker