Hi,

Jeffrey J. Kosowsky wrote on 2011-08-08 16:28:28 -0400 [Re: [BackupPC-users] 
Too many links : where is the problem ?]:
> Holger Parplies wrote at about 19:34:27 +0200 on Monday, August 8, 2011:
>  > Hi,
>  > 
>  > as Jeffrey said, we'll need meaningful information to give meaningful 
> answers.
> 
> Oh my goodness, did Holger Top Quote????? say it isn't so :P

well, I suppose it is *possible* to define top posting that way, but does
anyone? I didn't reply to anything and quote the question (or the whole mail)
afterwards. I was *trying* to acknowledge that you had given a more
comprehensive reply and I was only going to reflect on a minor aspect.

> FYI, On 32-bit Fedora 12/Linux 2.6.32:
>    Ext2/3: MAX=32000
>    Ext4: MAX=65000
> 
> This presumably should be true more generally for any relatively
> non-ancient & unhacked version of Linux...

Well, yes, probably, so you only have to figure out whether you have a
non-ancient and unhacked version of Linux (or just leave HardLinkMax at the
default and not worry about it). In general, I agree that you shouldn't
determine things by experiment that can be figured out by reading the
documentation. However, almost every Linux distribution seems to add their
own patches to the vanilla Linux kernel, and for *this* matter, the particular
limit whichever component of your system may be imposing is quite easy to
determine by experiment.

The Perl fragment I gave completes in something like a second on ext3/ext4
for me. On XFS, it is still running after 19 minutes with 72000 links created
so far (that's really slow, but it's more than 65000). However, that seems to
be an encryption issue. On a file server (with faster and unencrypted disks),
I reach the 1000000 I limited it to after 4:39 minutes. Still slow in
comparison, but it really seems pointless to limit HardLinkMax to 31999 on
XFS.
For reiserfs, I get 64535 (after about a second).
For tmpfs, I get "Cant create 220751th link: No space left on device" after
something like a second (not sure whether that is a space, quota, or link
count issue, really; 'df' seems to indicate there is still plenty of space
left).
Chances are, you don't want to store your BackupPC pool on tmpfs, though.

As I don't want to speculate on when your mileage may vary, I suggest you try
it for yourself if you're really interested.

Regards,
Holger

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