ZoneMinder Forums

I just noticed a ton of broken images in zoneminder. A bit of digging revealed that it's due to a #define limit on the number of files in a directory. For ext3, it's 32,000.

[root@onyx 1]# ls -1 | wc -l
31998
[root@onyx 1]# mkdir foo
mkdir: cannot create directory `foo': Too many links

Although other filesystems are better, I suspect that this happens to quite a few people. You might want to add an extra directory to the structure, such that

1/1234 becomes 1/12/1234
3/3928 becomes 3/39/3928

and so on..

-reza

this has been discussed before and apparetnylwhen the fs is created this number can be raised. Rieserfs doesnt have this limitation

forcing a persom to reformat or switch filesystems doesn't seem like a good solution. why not make a small change to the code to make it work better with exsisting filesystems.

-reza

I agree, it's unrealistic to expect people to move away from what is the standard filesystem on many distros for what sounds like a fairly simple fix.

well its not a small change, its a hell of a change. The whole recording file structure will have to change, it will break my contrib when Phil does it. I dont see it as that big an issue there has to be a limit somewhere. I think that if there is a way around it, we should do that.

I hadn't considered that - good point.

Shame, as ext3 is very widely used - the default for Debian, Ubuntu and probably others.

Ho hum, no doubt Phill will figure out the best compromise!

flash i beleive Phil is working on a work around but i feel personally its such a major change id rather not see it done. But then it appears im on my own so what the hell!!

I beleive that ext3 can be told to have more items per folder when created. But i never have the issue so i would be less bother ed by it. I use mocord or record only so the if i had 32000 events id have a drive of about 5 petabytes!!
Anyhow I have tested rieserfs and it is indeed un affected. I beleive you can change filesystem but wouldnt know how. I wonder wthat the next limit will be?

having a lot of directories/files in one folder is a bad thing anyhow. trying to up the limit at format time is probably a bad solution.

what does the code look like that reads/writes to it? I'm guessing that you could add a function such that wherever you spit out the id, the function breaks it down into a couple sudirectories

something like

open("$camera/$id") would be

open("$camera/".id_exapnd($id))

(example is in perl, but you get the idea).

-reza

but your still going to have that many items saved why is it a bad idea to have them under 1. Also we would have to store more in mysql as the first 10000 events would be exp1 then the next 10k in exp2 and so on.

reza wrote:having a lot of directories/files in one folder is a bad thing anyhow. trying to up the limit at format time is probably a bad solution.

what does the code look like that reads/writes to it? I'm guessing that you could add a function such that wherever you spit out the id, the function breaks it down into a couple sudirectories

something like

open("$camera/$id") would be

open("$camera/".id_exapnd($id))

(example is in perl, but you get the idea).

-reza

Unfortunately there is no 'one' place where this is done, as the binaries, scripts and web pages all need access. However breaking this up into a deeper directory is on the todo list for the next version if possible.

damn, i was hoping it was gonna be a while. Phil can i request its simple to understand so i can make zm4ms work with the new paths