XF 2.3 Too many inodes

[airgunforums]

Ok my server has told me I have too many
I have about 2,500,000
I’ve looked at where and my issue seems to be attachments
I have internal data attachments and data attachments
Now obviously these are duplicates of each other in theory
And I have 920 folders in each and each folder contains upto 1000 files
Any ideas on how I can resolve my issues as this is obviously the main cause of it

 

[mjda]

As far as I know there wouldn't be a way to resolve this within XF, without deleting some of your attachments. Your best bet is to request an increase from your hosting provider, upgrade your hosting to something with more inodes, or switch hosting completely.

 

[briansol]

Move your attachments to s3/R2/spaces. It's really the best thing you can do for yourself.

 

[mjda]

Move your attachments to s3/R2/spaces. It's really the best thing you can do for yourself.

Great suggestion right here. I actually use S3 myself and didn't even consider that to be something I suggested. Old age is no joke y'all!

 

[Anthony Parsons]

Ok my server has told me I have too many
I have about 2,500,000

Are you on shared hosting? That could be the only instance I could think would have such a low limit, as an OS has billions of inodes available. Honestly, it is cheap to just use a VPS, which would solve that issue. Not sure what you use, but if you need to transition to a VPS, I can help you out. Retired and always looking for things to do.

 

[airgunforums]

thanks for suggestions
i looked at vps but with having 1.5tb of files etc a vps would not be affordable till i reduce some size

 

[Anthony Parsons]

thanks for suggestions
i looked at vps but with having 1.5tb of files etc a vps would not be affordable till i reduce some size

Have you thought about hosting your attachments in S3? Cheap storage hosting and you're only paying a small price for the actual data transfer of pages being viewed loading images in content currently visited. Very little old, stale, content would be loaded.

You could leave your hosting as is, unload your 1.5TB attachments to S3 and then just pay the tiny storage cost and whatever the actual bandwidth cost is. Not sure if you have looked at that option. That would remove your inode issue and the huge local storage cost on a VPS or such.

 

[airgunforums]

Have you thought about hosting your attachments in S3? Cheap storage hosting and you're only paying a small price for the actual data transfer of pages being viewed loading images in content currently visited. Very little old, stale, content would be loaded.

You could leave your hosting as is, unload your 1.5TB attachments to S3 and then just pay the tiny storage cost and whatever the actual bandwidth cost is. Not sure if you have looked at that option. That would remove your inode issue and the huge local storage cost on a VPS or such.

I will have to look into S3 I’ve never heard of it before

 

[duderuud]

Our forum has about 2.5 mln attachments in total, all moved to Cloudflare R2.

 

[airgunforums]

To be fair I have been running the forum for years but I just muddle through and try to work things out

I try researching etc then as a last resort ask for help

I will say the person who has helped me massively over the years is Andy from XF2Addons

 

[briansol]

Moving the attachments is pretty simple with a few commands.

xf2.3 has this built in - no plugin needed unless you're on older version:

Using DigitalOcean Spaces or Amazon S3 for file storage

Nov 15, 2018

The same concepts can be applied to other adapters too.

• XenForo
• XenForo tips & guides [2.x]

Set up your env (aws s3 or cloudflare r2). Setting permissions/roles is the hardest part.

edit your config file to point there for file puts and gets.
go-forward, your stuff writes and pulls from there.

now, you need to migrate the old stuff.
You'll perhaps need some command line utilities here. but it's easy to do. just follow the steps.
it's all in the old plugin thread for how-to.

 

[Chromaniac]

i do want to know this. what shared hosting is providing 1TB+ storage space.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

ChatGPT can help you with command line and walk you through the process if you point it towards the above solution and what you want to achieve.

 

[briansol]

i do want to know this. what shared hosting is providing 1TB+ storage space.

UNLIMITED EVERYTHING, JUST $10 A MONTH.

1 core
1 mb ram
unlimited b/w
10 inodes

 

[BrettC]

inodes are effectively little metadata 'blobs' on linux. Differing filesystem types will grant you more or less inodes. For example, the news inode goes well above the default of standard - the exact values escape me, but it's in the low millions. However, a custom filesystem such as zfs can go well into the billions. For example, one of my ZFS file stores currently sits at 7830952825 total inodes.

If your host or the server that you manage is saying that the server is out of inodes, that means the file system is "technically full" - even if there is storage space available. 'No inodes available' literally means no more files can be stored on the given mounted file system until other files are deleted.

Your best bet is to move ALL attachments into a s3-friendly storage system. There are MANY 'premium' based s3-friendly options, but have varying costs: Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, AWS's S3, Azure Blob, GCloud.

Now, if you're a glutton for punishment with the desire to go the self-hosted route, and have some cash to burn on this... and want a decently good learning curve, check out MinIO or the recently forked (i think) RustFS - but some have reported security issues with RustFS, there is also Garage. Garage is what I am currently looking at implementing on my homelab before further expansion/implementation.