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Monitoring Free Space and Free Inodes

You can quickly check the amount of free space and free inodes with the df command. For example,

%  df
Filesystem                 Type  blocks     use   avail %use  Mounted on
/dev/root                   efs 1939714 1326891  612823  68%  /
The avail column shows the amount of free space in blocks.

To determine the number of free inodes, use this command:

% df -i 
Filesystem      Type  blocks     use   avail %use    iuse  ifree %iuse  Mounted
/dev/root        efs 1939714 1326891  612823  68%   14491 195031    7%  /
You see a listing similar to the first df listing, except that it also lists the number of inodes in use, the number of inodes that are free (available), and the percentage of inodes in use. For XFS filesystems, the number of free inodes is the maximum number that could be allocated if needed. XFS allocates inodes as needed. On XFS filesystems inode usage is very high only on very full filesystems.

On EFS filesystems, when a filesystem is more than about 90-95% full, system performance may degrade, depending on the size of the disk. (The number of free disk blocks on a 97% full large disk is larger than the number of free disk blocks on a 97% full small disk.) You should monitor the amount of available space and take steps to keep an adequate amount available. XFS filesystem performance doesn't degrade when XFS filesystems are very full.

Tip: The section "Monitoring Disk Space and Setting a Warning Level" in Chapter 6 of the Personal System Administration Guide describes how to use the Disk Manager in the System Toolchest to tell the system to issue warnings when disks reach capacities that you specify.


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