As a matter of course, VxFS file systems allocate and free
up inodes as required by the load on the file system. VxFS caches
these inodes for better performance (faster lookups). In general,
larger inode caches help file systems perform better for file/web
server loads. The global (static) tunable vx_ninode represents
the maximum possible size of the VxFS inode cache.
Normally, the size of the inode cache is decided (auto-tuned)
at boot time by VxFS depending on the amount of physical memory
in the machine, provided that the value of vx_ninode is
set to zero (default).
However, systems low on RAM (typically less than or equal
to 1GB/CPU) may not require a large inode cache
if file systems are not exposed to file/web server loads, or file
system performance is not critical. It is recommended that the value
of vx_ninode be set to more than that of nfile, an HP-UX tunable that represents the maximum number
of file descriptors.
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