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, system 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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