A while ago I had a problem with the internal file table in an HP-UX system. The file table (I think) is an internal kernel table that the OS is maintaining for all it's inodes - or something like that.

When the file table became full up all sorts of weird things started happening to my system and they were not restricted to (what looked like) file system errors.

The problem was the system was running out of inodes it could use and maintain in the file system. The number of inodes can be configured on a HP-UX as a kernel parameter and I would imagine that it could be on other flavours of Unix too. You might try increasing this parameter.

In my system the inodes usage was the result of a directory structure which went to too many levels. This structure was associated with data storage by processing date. When the data was finished with, the data files were removed, but the directories were left behind. Thus, the disk space was reclaimed but not necessarily all the inodes. To solve this I had a pruning process written which would remove empty directories from this directory structure and therefore reclaim the inodes.

This may or may not be the cause of your problems but it won't hurt to check how your diretories are organised; it is always useful to audit disk usage from time to time!

Hope this helps

MBB