sitz - 12:14 am on Apr 30, 2005 (gmt 0)

You may also want to look into other filesystems; your choice of filesystem, especially when it comes to issues like this, really does matter. I'd keep that tarball around for testing, get a test system, and play with filesystems; you may find that ReiserFS or XFS give you better results. Likewise, you could lay out your filesystem in such a way that you get the maximum number of inodes.

Finally, note that some filesystems (XFS and VxFS, for instance) don't suffer from inode limitations at all. XFS is SGI's filesystem which has been ported to Linux, and has been available in the 'standard' kernel since late in the 2.4 series. VxFS is the Veritas filesystem; it's available for purchase (at a premium) from Veritas. There's also FreeVxFS in the Linux kernel, but I've not played with it at all.

Goog luck. =)