File table is full

Question

I just had an unpleasant crash on my 10.8.3 system, with the logs telling me "file table is full" (many, many times).  Verify and Repair volume didn't find any errors, and a df now shows that I've still got loads of available inodes,
$ df -ih /
Filesystem   Size    Used  Avail      Capacity   iused             ifree              %iused   Mounted on
/dev/disk4  1.8Ti  1.0Ti  820Gi    56%          273127665   214959156   56%        /
And other than Spotlight telling me that it will take 4 hours to re-index everything, I see no problems now.  Should I suspect that some process started creating files with abandon?  My Dropbox client (version 2.0.8) had been acting strangely during the day. (Claiming that it always had one file to sync, but never syncing it). Skype (6.3.0.582) was the first to report to me an I/O error.  I'm also not sure how I can fill up the file table without first running out of inodes, but I don't know the internals of HFS+ and my days of understanding ufs are long behind me.
So the question(s): Should I suspect that some process started creating files with abandon or should I consider some other cause and how do I investigate further?
Cheers,
-j

Answer 1

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below to select it:
syslog -k Sender kernel -k Message CSeq "I/O error" | tail
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C).
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V).
The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear.
Post any lines of output that appear below what you entered — the text, please, not a screenshot.