topic Re: Effect of setting then umber of inodes ti the maw for a volume in ONTAP Discussions

Effect of setting then umber of inodes ti the maw for a volume

grocanar — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 09:50:23 GMT

i have some user who want to increase the number of inode to the max value.

What are the potential problem for doing that ?

I would like to have some argument to say no 🙂

Re: Effect of setting then umber of inodes ti the maw for a volume

SpindleNinja — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 15:36:20 GMT

Just willy-nilly set it to the max a volume can take? Could impact performance -

https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/ontap/volumes/cautions-increasing-maximum-directory-size-concept.html

Re: Effect of setting then umber of inodes ti the maw for a volume

paul_stejskal — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 16:05:18 GMT

https://kb.netapp.com/onprem/ontap/os/Considerations_before_increasing_the_file_count_in_ONTAP

Re: Effect of setting then umber of inodes ti the maw for a volume

grocanar — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 07:15:31 GMT

Thanks for your pointer.

as far as i can understand there s no impact of performance except for program that need to enumerate files for example for backup.
It s different for maxdirsize that need to be in memory then impact for performance.

Re: Effect of setting then umber of inodes ti the maw for a volume

paul_stejskal — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 13:20:20 GMT

The more inodes, the more pressure on the inode cache potentially. I wouldn't recommend it personally.

Re: Effect of setting then umber of inodes ti the maw for a volume

grocanar — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 13:40:53 GMT

is there some documentation about this inode cache?

I found some post speaking about it but with no desciption of the usage.
I would like to appreciate this pressute to see if this acceptable or not

Re: Effect of setting then umber of inodes ti the maw for a volume

paul_stejskal — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 13:46:42 GMT

Not really. It is an internal structure and won't cause any user pressure, but the problem is if you increase inodes too high you can run into high latency on metadata operations.