Tuning the maxusers as a means of increasing the available inodes was taught by Sun in their 2.x Network Admin course and was included in the NFS Server Performance and Tuning guide. So as a recommended method, I regard it as having been safe, useful and effective.
Tuning maxusers is a very old fashioned approach to system tuning; are you sure you weren't told to do this in relation to SunOS4.x, which was the earlier Sun UNIX OS, and a BSD derivative? I believe you absolutely do tune maxusers there, but not Solaris 2.x. Typically you would tune more specifically - e.g. ncsize for the DNLC, nrnodes for NFS inode count, etc. Turning the wick up on maxusers will change sizing for the whole system and could easily result in negative performance gains.
cheers --justin -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2013-06-04 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
