Disk Inodes

[atechstl]

It seems that our Disk Inodes is reaching a limit. Although we are only using about 1/3rd our disk space there apparently seems to be too many files.

Does anybody know standard practices on cleaning this up. Example: Clean out Temp file directories...

I have had support bump this up a few times already.

[Ron]

Well, sure... cleaning out temp directories would be a great place to go. How many do you have and how many "real" files are you generating? Has support said there is a hard limit over which they won't go?

[JPC-NickO]

Hi,

If you want something that can do a quick estimate, try this:

path=/home; for f in `ls $path`; do inode=`find $path/$f | wc -l`; echo "$inode $path/$f"; done | sort -rn

If I were you I'd start at / e.g

path=/; for f in `ls $path`; do inode=`find $path/$f | wc -l`; echo "$inode $path/$f"; done | sort -rn

This will take a long time.

You can then run the command again on the larger folders to determine which folders within them are using the most inodes.

This is what the output on my system looks like:

path=/; for f in `ls $path`; do inode=`find $path/$f | wc -l`; echo "$inode $f"; done | sort -rn
252125 usr
182104 data
37490 home
34317 var
9281 sys
4765 proc
2969 dev
839 etc
431 lib
148 sbin
116 bin
28 tftproot
14 root
9 mnt
7 media
5 tmp
2 opt
2 boot
1 srv

[Ron]

You'd think that du or a clone thereof could/should include that functionality...

Neat command line, NickO

[atechstl]

It seems that I have an account I gave to a friend that is utilizing 22913 inodes.

I also see a directory called /home/cpeasyapache utilizing 12141 inodes. It is a little unclear what I want to keep and remove hear. We are going to clean up a few things but will see if support will raise the limit.

[Pawel Kowalski]

Support should raise this limit for you, I had a similar issue in the past and they had no problem upping the limit.

[dewd]

the "path=/; for f in `ls $path`; do inode=`find $path/$f | wc -l`; echo "$inode $path/$f"; done | sort -rn" command does not work for me in ssh,

what am i doing wrong?

[JPC-NickO]

Hi,

Are you getting an error message?

You must be running as root in order to have the appropriate access to read most of the folders in /.

[Ron]

So if you are not running as root (or can't run as root), in the above example you'd want to alter

path=/;

to something like

path=/home/<username>;

if you are on a shared account, for example.
Or you could just go to the highest level you can reach and use

path=./;

[atechstl]

Support raised my limit.

[JPC-Nick]

Support raised my limit.

We will raise most limits that are not in regards to RAM without charge.

[thisisit3]

A few things to remember about QoS limits in a VPS:

1) Don't blindly ask for support to raise the limits!

2) Investigate why you are hitting the limits.

3) Is it a specific domain or script? does it need more memory or is it a badly written script?

4) Are you getting too much concurrent traffic? Make sure you are using cache in your dynamic websites.

5) Some limits are set too low to begin with, like "numfile", "numproc" and the TCP buffer related limits. A busy VPS will definitely hit those right away.

6) You may also hit "numiptent", this stores iptables rules, if you don't ban IPs via BFD or modsec or another script then you shouldn't worry about this one.

7) I suggest you use the memory script or the JagMonitor WHM script, both can be found below in my signature.

[Pawel Kowalski]

A few things to remember about QoS limits in a VPS:

1) Don't blindly ask for support to raise the limits!

2) Investigate why you are hitting the limits.

Now you have me worried.

Are disk inodes something that can be used up by a badly written script? What exactly causes the usage in disk inodes? I was under the assumption that this was just how many files you have on your vps.

[thisisit3]

its just that you have many small files and you've reached the disk inode limit, i don't think its related to a script. What i wrote above is a general guide and not specific to disk inodes.

[atechstl]

The only scripts I see running on the server is Mail Scanner and Config Server Firewall. As far as user scripts all the users are using scripts from Fantastico such as Cubecart, Joomla, Form Mail, etc.

I do use the Jag Monitor. My memory loads appear to be fine. Occasionally there are some memory spikes hear and there that last for a few minutes, but the server seems to be running strong.