Unix systems have inode limits; google to find specific information on your distro

You need to have a pretty small filesystem so that 10,000 inodes becomes a problem.

Also, the number of inodes is typically dependent on the size of your file system, although it can be set manually when creating the filesystem. To find out how many inodes your filesystem has, and how many available, instead of googling, it maybe a lot easier to run df -i. (My ext3 filesystems seem to have about a quarter of a million inodes per Gb)