RESOLVED: Crashplan and inotify watches
Posted: Fri Jul 10, 2015 2:47 pm
I was reviewing my logs when I spotted the ntpd service being started every minute or two. Digging into this further, I discovered that restarting ntpd manually (sudo systemctl restart ntpd.service) resulted in a "Error: Not enough space on device" message.
This got me worried, but checking drive space, I found that all the drives had plenty of space, and there were no shortage of inodes (a common reason for the message). I rebooted (the shutdown command also resulted in a "Not enough space on device" message, but it did restart), but this did not solve the problem. I then decided to watch the log (tail -f /var/log/messages) and spotted the following message:
A clue! It turns out that Crashplan needs a lot of inotify watches, and the default of 8192 had been used on my system, which resulted in the various "Not enough space on device" error messages, which were actually generated by inotify and nothing to do with ntpd or disk space.
There are some instructions for increasing the number of inotify watches on your system on the Crashplan website
Update: I spoke too soon - the ntpd service is still continually restarting (once every minute or two). No more "Not enough space messages", though!
This got me worried, but checking drive space, I found that all the drives had plenty of space, and there were no shortage of inodes (a common reason for the message). I rebooted (the shutdown command also resulted in a "Not enough space on device" message, but it did restart), but this did not solve the problem. I then decided to watch the log (tail -f /var/log/messages) and spotted the following message:
Code: Select all
tail: inotify resources exhausted
tail: inotify cannot be used, reverting to polling
There are some instructions for increasing the number of inotify watches on your system on the Crashplan website
Update: I spoke too soon - the ntpd service is still continually restarting (once every minute or two). No more "Not enough space messages", though!