Once upon a time, Robert Nichols rnicholsNOSPAM@comcast.net said:
It's a problem that crops up occasionally, and makes people wonder why they get a "No space on filesystem" error when the df command shows that plenty of space is available. That's why the df command has a "-i" option to report inode usage. A filesystem that's being used for things like a news spool, which holds lots of small files, needs to be created with more than the default allocation of inodes.
Heh, I haven't run a Usenet server in just over 23 years, but even then, server software was moving away from the file-per-article storage to avoid this issue (and others).
Mail servers, on the other hand, were jumping to the file-per-message method just as fast as Usenet servers discarded it, and are still using it.