Say you have an application running on a Linux server using the ext2 or ext3 file systems. You set up a caching scheme in your application to store files like so:
/cache/stamps/1/main_content.cache
/cache/stamps/1/comments.cache
/cache/stamps/2/main_content.cache
/cache/stamps/2/comments.cache
/cache/stamps/3/main_content.cache
/cache/stamps/3/comments.cache
...
Eventually, you’re going to run into a problem: Your caching will stop working since your application won’t be able to write to the “stamps” directory any more. Instead, you’ll get an error message like this:
Couldn't create cache directory: /stamps/41134/main_content (Too many links - /var/www/your-app/tmp/cache/stamps/41134)
At that point, you’ll try to search for “too many links”, and probably you won’t find much information that is actually comprehensible to normal human beings. Fortunately, it really is quite simple to repair once you understand what’s going on.