So a client of mine got an email from Linode today saying their server was causing Linode's backup service to blow up. Why? Too many files. I laughed and then ran:
# df -ih
Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/xvda 2.5M 2.4M 91K 97% /
Crap. 2.4million inodes in use. What the hell has been going on?!
I've looked for the obvious suspects (/var/{log,cache}
and the directory where all the sites are hosted from) but I'm not finding anything really suspicious. Somewhere on this beast I'm certain there's a directory that contains a couple of million files.
For context one my my busy servers uses 200k inodes and my desktop (an old install with over 4TB of used storage) is only just over a million. There is a problem.
So my question is, how do I find where the problem is? Is there a du
for inodes?