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

[grocanar]

Hi

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 🙂 

[SpindleNinja · Accepted solution]

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

[paul_stejskal]

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

[grocanar]

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.

[paul_stejskal]

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

[grocanar]

Hi 

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 

[paul_stejskal]

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.