SUMMARY: problems with disks claiming they are full

Last week I put this message out:

>
>Folks,
>        I have a few squid caches that I am having problems with, I
>don't believe it to be a squid problem per se (I did ask on the squid
>mailing list anyway) but probably more the way squid uses the file
>system.  What I am seeing is the operating system claiming that the
>disk is full.  From what df is saying at the time - the disk is NOT
>full.  If I do a "df -k" I see plenty of free space, doing a "df -oi"
>shows me plenty of free inodes (the newfs for the partition was done
>to allow for lots of little files) but despite this, sometimes squid
>and the kernel complain that the disk is full!
>
>I see this happen on both a 2.6 and a 2.7 machine with recommended
>patches, I have tried trawling the SunSolve database without finding
>anything sensible.  Can anyone offer any help here?
>


Thanks to:

        Alan Clegg
        Bernhard Sadlowski
        ed.rolison@power.alstom.com
        Pankaj Anand
        Timothy Lorenc
        Darren Spiteri
        Dietsch, Nathan
        Wesley W. Garland
        Adrian Blount

For their thoughts (though some people seemed not to read all of my
message! ;-).  The answer that best fit my problem came from Adrian
Blount, who pointed me at a portion of the Squid FAQ that I had not
noticed before.  I have changed the settings as per the FAQ and I
will see if that helps.  Here is what Adrian had to say:

        You could have run out of free blocks on the filesystem.  UFS has
        large-ish blocks and when it runs out it can't allocate more.  You
        need to make squid use less of your filesystem (I've found that
        giving squid 7gb of a 9gb filesystem is OK) so there's free space. 
        If the filesystem is full it'll be slower as it tries to find
        contiguous space etc.

        Have a look here under "Tuning":
        http://cache.jp.apan.net/CacheDoc-jp/work/SquidFAQ/FAQ-14.html

-- 
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Brett Lymn, Computer Systems Administrator, BAE SYSTEMS
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