EC
EUSERS
Linux / POSIXERRORNotableFilesystemHIGH confidence

Too Many Users

Production Risk

Indicates quota table saturation; clean up stale entries.

What this means

EUSERS (errno 87) is returned by quota management operations when the number of users with quotas exceeds the maximum, and by some NFS operations.

Why it happens
  1. 1Quota subsystem: too many users have quota entries
  2. 2NFS: too many connected users exceed server limit
How to reproduce

Quota operation when user limit exceeded.

trigger — this will error
trigger — this will error
// quotactl when user quota table is full
quotactl(QCMD(Q_SETQUOTA, USRQUOTA), "/dev/sda1", uid, &dqblk);
// Returns -1, errno = EUSERS if quota table full

expected output

quotactl: Too many users (EUSERS)

Fix

Increase quota table size or clean up unused quotas

WHEN When quota operations return EUSERS

Increase quota table size or clean up unused quotas
# List all users with quotas
repquota -a
# Remove quotas for deleted users
edquota -d username
# Or increase quota file limits in filesystem config

Why this works

Remove stale quota entries for users that no longer exist to free quota table slots.

Sources
Official documentation ↗

Linux Programmer Manual errno(3)

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