One possibility is the creation/expansion of directories or allocation of indirect blocks for large files. Not sure if this is the issue here but at one time inode allocation was considered slow and so folks may have pre-allocated inodes to avoid that overhead during file creation. To my understanding inode creation time is not so slow that users need to pre-allocate inodes. Yes, there are likely some applications where pre-allocating may be necessary but I expect they would be the exception. I mention this because you have a lot of free inodes and of course once they are allocated they cannot be de-allocated. Fred __________________________________________________ Fred Stock | IBM Pittsburgh Lab | 720-430-8821 stockf at us.ibm.com From: "Buterbaugh, Kevin L" <Kevin.Buterbaugh at Vanderbilt.Edu> To: gpfsug main discussion list <gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org> Date: 01/23/2018 12:17 PM Subject: [gpfsug-discuss] Metadata only system pool Sent by: gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org Hi All, I was under the (possibly false) impression that if you have a filesystem where the system pool contains metadata only then the only thing that would cause the amount of free space in that pool to change is the creation of more inodes … is that correct? In other words, given that I have a filesystem with 130 million free (but allocated) inodes: Inode Information ----------------- Number of used inodes: 218635454 Number of free inodes: 131364674 Number of allocated inodes: 350000128 Maximum number of inodes: 350000128 I would not expect that a user creating a few hundred or thousands of files could cause a “no space left on device” error (which I’ve got one user getting). There’s plenty of free data space, BTW. Now my system pool is almost “full”: (pool total) 2.878T 34M ( 0%) 140.9M ( 0%) But again, what - outside of me creating more inodes - would cause that to change?? Thanks… Kevin — Kevin Buterbaugh - Senior System Administrator Vanderbilt University - Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education Kevin.Buterbaugh at vanderbilt.edu - (615)875-9633 _______________________________________________ gpfsug-discuss mailing list gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__gpfsug.org_mailman_listinfo_gpfsug-2Ddiscuss&d=DwICAg&c=jf_iaSHvJObTbx-siA1ZOg&r=p_1XEUyoJ7-VJxF_w8h9gJh8_Wj0Pey73LCLLoxodpw&m=gou0xYZwz8M-5i8mT6Tthafi8JW2aMrzQGMK1hUEUls&s=jcHOB_vmJjE8PnrpfHqzMkm1nk6QWwkn2npTEP6kcKs&e= -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://gpfsug.org/pipermail/gpfsug-discuss_gpfsug.org/attachments/20180123/6f557195/attachment.html>