attached is a correction (text pulled from kernel's
Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt file) of the file-nr proc file.
It might be nice to clarify the difference between allocated and
utilized, but I didn't go there in this case. I can, if it would be
helpful.
thanks,
Andrew
diff --git a/man5/proc.5 b/man5/proc.5
index ed47f70..4f54ccd 100644
--- a/man5/proc.5
+++ b/man5/proc.5
@@ -1837,16 +1837,12 @@ value of
or you will run out of inodes.
.TP
.I /proc/sys/fs/file-nr
-This (read-only) file gives the number of files presently opened.
-It contains three numbers: the number of allocated file handles;
-the number of free file handles; and the maximum number of file handles.
-The kernel allocates file handles dynamically, but it
-doesn't free them again.
-If the number of allocated files is close to the
-maximum, you should consider increasing the maximum.
-When the number of free file handles is
-large, you've encountered a peak in your usage of file
-handles and you probably don't need to increase the maximum.
+Historically, the three values in file-nr denoted the number of
+allocated file handles, the number of allocated but unused file
+handles, and the maximum number of file handles. Linux 2.6 always
+reports 0 as the number of free file handles -- this is not an error,
+it just means that the number of allocated file handles exactly
+matches the number of used file handles.
.TP
.I /proc/sys/fs/inode-max
This file contains the maximum number of in-memory inodes.
