An Inode is a data structure used to store the meta data of a file. Inode number represents the collective number of files and folders present in your web hosting account.

 

There are no free file system inodes left

It’s quite easy for a disk to have a large number of inodes used even if the disk is not very full.

.Each file and folder use an inode. When the file system is created, a specific block of inodes is created for that file system. If many small files are present, this can cause the pool of inodes to be consumed prematurely.

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.

 

• My file system has plenty of space left, but I’m getting errors about a lack of inodes. How do I detect and fix this?
• To find out “what directory has a large number of files in it?”

The number of used/free inodes can be seen here:

#find / -xdev -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -k 1 -n

or

# df -i /dev/(device) for the entire device or filesystem

Determine what is creating all the small files, and delete them if that is practical.

Add additional space to the device. The ratio will stay the same, but additional inodes will be added to the file system.