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Re: GIF breaks Linux's EXT4 filesystem

Cross-posted to 2 groups.

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On Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:57:27 +1000, Axel wrote:

> https://www.tomshardware.com/service-providers/web-hosting/friends-gif-cripples-website-discussion-platform-backup-with-377-gigabytes-of-rachels-happy-dance-1-6mb-animation-was-replicated-246-173-times-breaking-filesystem-limit

Out of curiosity, I had a look into what exactly were the capabilities
of ext4. Turns out this 64K limit is just a default setting.

Exhibit A: <https://manpages.debian.org/link(2)>, description of the EMLINK error:

    EMLINK
        The file referred to by oldpath already has the maximum number
        of links to it. For example, on an ext4(5) filesystem that
        does not employ the dir_index feature, the limit on the number
        of hard links to a file is 65,000; on btrfs(5), the limit is
        65,535 links.

Exhibit B: <https://manpages.debian.org/ext4(5)>, relevant filesystem
initialization options:

    dir_index
        Use hashed b-trees to speed up name lookups in large
        directories. This feature is supported by ext3 and ext4 file
        systems, and is ignored by ext2 file systems.

Doesn’t actually mention any link limit, but the next one does:

    dir_nlink
        Normally, ext4 allows an inode to have no more than 65,000
        hard links. This applies to regular files as well as
        directories, which means that there can be no more than 64,998
        subdirectories in a directory (because each of the '.' and
        '..' entries, as well as the directory entry for the directory
        in its parent directory counts as a hard link). This feature
        lifts this limit by causing ext4 to use a link count of 1 to
        indicate that the number of hard links to a directory is not
        known when the link count might exceed the maximum count
        limit.

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Thread

GIF breaks Linux's EXT4 filesystem Axel <none@not.here> - 2026-04-15 06:57 +1000
  Re: GIF breaks Linux's EXT4 filesystem Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-04-14 22:06 +0000
  Re: GIF breaks Linux's EXT4 filesystem RelicMonkey <relic@nothingness.org> - 2026-04-15 14:23 +0200
  Re: GIF breaks Linux's EXT4 filesystem german newsgroups <usualsuspectrider@gmail.com> - 2026-04-23 18:09 +0200
  Re: GIF breaks Linux's EXT4 filesystem german newsgroups <usualsuspectrider@gmail.com> - 2026-05-06 06:32 +0200

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