[TriLUG] Issue with heavy use of inodes on NFS mounted file systems

[Errol Casey]

I have recently encounterd an issue on linux servers (Redhat 7.1),
that are using NFS for their file systems, where the inode usage
becomes abnormally high.

i.e.  mail size is=1752064

Where mail is a /var/spool/mail directory. If the spool directory is
renamed, and
a new directory is created and the content of the renamed directory
moved into the new directory the inode count will reduce to 1024-4096
normally.

Is this a file system issue, or is it possible that something is
holding inodes after files are being removed? I have attempted to use
lsof to determine

The NFS servers are EMC and Netapp equipment. The file system is being
mounted via NFS, and ext3.