From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Apr 12 14:17:33 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from dan.emsphone.com (dan.emsphone.com [199.67.51.101]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 69DCF155C0 for ; Mon, 12 Apr 1999 14:17:26 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dan@dan.emsphone.com) Received: (from dan@localhost) by dan.emsphone.com (8.9.2/8.9.2) id QAA42733; Mon, 12 Apr 1999 16:14:40 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from dan) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 16:14:40 -0500 From: Dan Nelson To: Christopher Palmer Cc: Greg Lehey , "Randy A. Katz" , questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Too many links Message-ID: <19990412161440.A42365@dan.emsphone.com> References: <19990412121738.I2142@lemis.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.3i In-Reply-To: ; from "Christopher Palmer" on Mon Apr 12 14:56:08 GMT 1999 X-OS: FreeBSD 3.1-STABLE Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In the last episode (Apr 12), Christopher Palmer said: > On Mon, 12 Apr 1999, Greg Lehey wrote: > > > Seriously, it's a performance issue. The current limit is in > > /usr/include/sys/syslimits.h: > > > > #define LINK_MAX 32767 /* max file link count */ > > > > Theoretically you could just increase this value and 'make world', but > > you might run into int overflow problems. I certainly think that > > there are better alternatives to this issue than adding yet more > > directories to one which is too full already. > > Yikes! Is this a filesystem-wide limit (not more than 32767 files/dirs > total) or a directory-specific limitation (not more than 32767 files/dirs > per dir)? Neither. The limit is "not more than 32767 links on a single inode". The original poster was getting this message when he created 32767 subdirectories off a single parent. "." in the parent has to link to ".." in each child. That's where he's getting his error. I imagine he's getting horrible delays in lookup up files though. Most companies bypass this by creating a multlevel directory tree when they have to manage thousands of users (Netcom's FTP site, for example, puts "bob"'s ftp site in /pub/bo/bob). -Dan Nelson dnelson@emsphone.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message