[OpenAFS] AFS file-number, volume-size limits?

[Derrick J Brashear]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, Stephen Joyce wrote:

> FWIW I found this limit several years back on transarc 3.6 servers.  If I
> recall correctly, it's 64K files if filenames are < 32 characters and half
> that if filenames are over 32 characters. (this is from memory--I have it
> documented somewhere in my hundreds of megs of email...)

Todd DeSantis sent the nice detailed answer. We used to see it routinely
when we used the Andrew Mail System where the folders would hit 31707
files and lose.

> The way I found the problem is that a student was trying to create 64K+1
> files in a directory and it crashed the fileserver process on the server
> housing that volume!  I opened a trouble-ticket with transarc and they
> eventually fixed the bug causing the fileserver crash, but when I asked for
> a fix to allow > 64K files/directory, I got ... well, not quite laughed at,
> but you get the idea.

The dir object would need to be modified in a way to maintain
compatibility, or we'd need a flag day, or we'd need to rewrite it on the
fly.

> I don't know if the crash-fix made it into the OpenAFS code or not...

We routinely hit the limit with Solaris; I'm sure we've hit it with Linux.
No crashes. Dunno what the issue was.