On Thu, 20 Nov 1997, Kenneth Whittaker wrote:
Discrepency between du and df on an empty filesystem. I suspect that it is the meta-data files. There are invisible files that hold information about the filesystem.
New information: I bumped up the maxfiles on all four filers to2.5 million inodes. The adm1-na1 and adm1-na4 both printed the warning about having more than twice as many files as needed, but adm1-na2 and adm1-na3 did not. However, after all four were set to 2.5 million files, the df did not change (trying after umounting and remounting the filesystems, rebooting the filers, etc.).
As Ken mentioned, when meta-data files are created, they are just a large "hole". That is, the size of the file is large, but there aren't actually any blocks in it because it contains nothing but zeros.
So running "maxfiles" doesn't actually consume any space when you run it. The space only gets allocate when you actually create a new file with an inode number that places it in a new part of the inode file.
Dave