Greetings,
I'm planning on using a NetApp 760 to store *many* small files. However, I'm getting vague answers from NetApp for my problem, so I figure I'd ask here.
NetApp has told me that they don't recommend that I have more than 250,000 inodes per volume. Is this a real limitation, because my NetApps currently have 6.1 million inodes available? The online documentation says I only need to add more hard drives to get more inodes (1 per 32K). Has anyone used the netapp for small files? Small means millions of < 60K. Also, I need all these files available on one share.
Also, what should I look out for? I know to disable the read ahead cache. I plan to not use snapshots.
thanx, -Mag
On Mon, 15 Jan 2001, Magnus Thorne wrote:
NetApp has told me that they don't recommend that I have more than 250,000 inodes per volume. Is this a real limitation, because my NetApps currently have 6.1 million inodes available?
That's news to me. I have several filers with over a million files on a volume:
# rsh adm1-na5 df -i Filesystem iused ifree %iused Mounted on /vol/vol0/ 3157255 1842725 63% /vol/vol0/ # rsh adm1-na6 df -i Filesystem iused ifree %iused Mounted on /vol/vol0/ 3403425 1596555 68% /vol/vol0/ [etc...]
I myself have run filers with over 2 million inodes. 6 million, 10 million, whatever... shouldn't be a problem, so long as you have enough disk space.
Obviously, when you deal with large metadata files performance can suffer, since the filer can no longer hold it all in memory and instead has to page portions in and out to disk. So naturally there is some performance penalty, but it's not like the thing is going to come to a grinding halt on you. If you do run out of CPU you can always move to more filers or bigger filers.
Nothing wrong with using Snapshots if you want them, too.
Bruce
From my past experience on a 760 with about 15M inodes in use on one volume - we found no problems with the day to day usage. What we did find problematic was backup. Lot's of small files puts a very heavy load on your backup system. It will probably decrease the backup speed significantly and of course decrease the recovery speed as well.
When planning your volume sizes take into account the time it takes you to recover a volume in a disaster recovery scenerio and make sure that your planned recovery time coincides with your business requirements.
Another point concerning your backup system, is that for every file backed up your backup system stores about 200 bytes of information regardless fo the file size of the data being backedup. Thus your backup database will largely increase in size when backing up millions of tiny files. This will then hamper the time it takes to locate a file in the backup database for recovery.
Magnus Thorne wrote:
Greetings,
I'm planning on using a NetApp 760 to store *many* small files. However, I'm getting vague answers from NetApp for my problem, so I figure I'd ask here.
NetApp has told me that they don't recommend that I have more than 250,000 inodes per volume. Is this a real limitation, because my NetApps currently have 6.1 million inodes available? The online documentation says I only need to add more hard drives to get more inodes (1 per 32K). Has anyone used the netapp for small files? Small means millions of < 60K. Also, I need all these files available on one share.
Also, what should I look out for? I know to disable the read ahead cache. I plan to not use snapshots.
thanx, -Mag
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Brian Tao -
Bruce Sterling Woodcock -
Magnus Thorne -
Manny Kaiser