Quota Limits

You can set limits for individual users to file and data block usage on a file system. You can set two kinds of limits for each of the two resources:

• The hard limit is an absolute limit that cannot be exceeded under any circumstances.
• The soft limit, which must be lower than the hard limit, can be exceeded, but only for a limited time. The time limit can be configured on a per-file system basis only. The VxFS default limit is seven days.

A typical use of soft limits is when a user must run an application that could generate large temporary files. In this case, you can allow the user to exceed the quota limit for a limited time. No allocations are allowed after the expiration of the time limit. Use the edquota command to set limits (see Using Quotas for an example).

Although file and data block limits can be set individually for each user , the time limits apply to the file system as a whole. The quota limit information is associated with user IDs and is stored in a user quota file (see Quota Files on VxFS below).

The quota soft limit can be exceeded when VxFS preallocates space to a file. See Attribute Specifics for information on extent allocation policies.

Quota limits cannot exceed two terabytes on a Version 5 disk layout.