How to Free Inode Usage

Question

I have a disk drive where the inode usage is 100   using df -i command   However after deleting files substantially  the usage remains 100     What s the correct way to do it then   How is it possible that a disk drive with less disk space usage can have higher Inode usage than disk drive with higher disk space usage   Is it possible if i zip lot of files would that reduce the used inode count

User · Answer

We experienced this on a HostGator account  who place inode limits on all their hosting  following a spam attack  It left vast numbers of queue records in  root  cpanel comet  If this happens and you find you have no free inodes  you can run this cpanel utility through shell    usr local cpanel bin purge dead comet files

User · Answer

Many answers to this one so far and all of the above seem concrete  I think you ll be safe by using stat as you go along  but OS depending  you may get some inode errors creep up on you  So implementing your own stat call functionality using 64bit to avoid any overflow issues seems fairly compatible

User · Answer

We faced similar issue recently  In case if a process refers to a deleted file  the Inode shall not be released  so you need to check lsof    and kill  restart the process will release the inodes    Correct me if am wrong here

User · Answer

Late answer  In my case  it was my session files under    var lib php sessions   that were using Inodes  I was even unable to open my crontab or making a new directory let alone triggering the deletion operation  Since I use PHP  we have this guide where I copied the code from example 1 and set up a cronjob to execute that part of the code    lt  php    Note  This script should be executed by the same user of web server  process      Need active session to initialize session data storage access  session start        Executes GC immediately session gc        Clean up session ID created by session gc   session destroy      gt    If you re wondering how did I manage to open my crontab  then well  I deleted some sessions manually through CLI   Hope this helps

User · Answer

It s quite easy for a disk to have a large number of inodes used even if the disk is not very full   An inode is allocated to a file so  if you have gazillions of files  all 1 byte each  you ll run out of inodes long before you run out of disk   It s also possible that deleting files will not reduce the inode count if the files have multiple hard links  As I said  inodes belong to the file  not the directory entry  If a file has two directory entries linked to it  deleting one will not free the inode   Additionally  you can delete a directory entry but  if a running process still has the file open  the inode won t be freed   My initial advice would be to delete all the files you can  then reboot the box to ensure no processes are left holding the files open   If you do that and you still have a problem  let us know   By the way  if you re looking for the directories that contain lots of files  this script may help      bin bash   count em - count files in all subdirectories under current directory  echo  echo   ls -a   1    wc -l   1   gt  tmp count em    chmod 700  tmp count em    find   -mount -type d -print0   xargs -0 -n1  tmp count em      sort -n rm -f  tmp count em

User · Answer

You can use RSYNC to DELETE the large number of files  rsync -a --delete blanktest  test    Create blanktest folder with 0 files in it and command will sync your test folders with large number of files I have deleted nearly 5M files using this method    Thanks to http   www slashroot in which-is-the-fastest-method-to-delete-files-in-linux

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My situation was that I was out of inodes and I had already deleted about everything I could      df -i Filesystem     Inodes  IUsed  IFree IUse  Mounted on  dev sda1      942080 507361     11  100      I am on an ubuntu 12 04LTS and could not remove the old linux kernels which took up about 400 000 inodes because apt was broken because of a missing package  And I couldn t install the new package because I was out of inodes so I was stuck   I ended up deleting a few old linux kernels by hand to free up about 10 000 inodes     sudo rm -rf  usr src linux-headers-3 2 0-2    This was enough to then let me install the missing package and fix my apt    sudo apt-get install linux-headers-3 2 0-76-generic-pae   and then remove the rest of the old linux kernels with apt    sudo apt-get autoremove   things are much better now    df -i Filesystem     Inodes  IUsed  IFree IUse  Mounted on  dev sda1      942080 507361 434719   54

User · Answer

My solution   Try to find if this is an inodes problem with   df -ih   Try to find root folders with large inodes count   for i in     do echo  i  find  i  wc -l  done   Try to find specific folders   for i in  src    do echo  i  find  i  wc -l  done   If this is linux headers  try to remove oldest with   sudo apt-get autoremove linux-headers-3 13 0-24   Personally I moved them to a mounted folder  because for me last command failed  and installed the latest with   sudo apt-get autoremove -f   This solved my problem

User · Answer

In one of the above answers it was suggested that sessions was the cause of  running out of inodes and in our case that is exactly what it was   To add to that answer though I would suggest to check the php ini file and ensure session gc probability   1 also session gc divisor   1000 and session gc maxlifetime   1440  In our case session gc probability was equal to 0 and caused this issue

User · Answer

On Raspberry Pi I had a problem with  var cache fontconfig dir with large number of files  Removing it took more than hour  And of couse rm -rf   cache  raised Argument list too long error  I used below one find   -name    cache     xargs rm -f

User · Answer

I had the same problem  fixed it by removing the directory sessions of php  rm -rf  var lib php sessions    It may be under  var lib php5 if you are using a older php version   Recreate it with the following permission  mkdir  var lib php sessions   amp  amp  chmod 1733  var lib php sessions    Permission by default for directory on Debian showed drwx-wx-wt  1733

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this article saved my day  https   bewilderedoctothorpe net 2018 12 21 out-of-inodes  find   -maxdepth 1 -type d   grep -v          xargs -n 1 -i   find    -xdev -type f   cut -d  quot   quot  -f 2   uniq -c   sort -n

User · Answer

If you use docker  remove all images  They used many space       Stop all containers  docker stop   docker ps -a -q    Delete all containers  docker rm   docker ps -a -q    Delete all images  docker rmi   docker images -q    Works to me

User · Answer

As told before  filesystem may run out of inodes  if there are a lot of small files  I have provided some means to find directories that contain most files here

User · Answer

If you are very unlucky you have used about 100  of all inodes and can t create the scipt  You can check this with df -ih   Then this bash command may help you   sudo find   -xdev -type f   cut -d     -f 2   sort   uniq -c   sort -n   And yes  this will take time  but you can locate the directory with the most files

User · Answer

you could see this info  for i in  var run   do echo -n   i    find  i  wc -l done   column -t

User · Answer

eaccelerator could be causing the problem since it compiles PHP into blocks   I ve had this problem with an Amazon AWS server on a site with heavy load   Free up Inodes by deleting the eaccelerator cache in  var cache eaccelerator if you continue to have issues   rm -rf  var cache eaccelerator      or whatever your cache dir

[linux] How to Free Inode Usage?

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