Recently, Apache, qmail, MySQL, etc. crashed on my VPS due to not enough inodes.

The tech was helpful, and agreed to temporarily increase my inodes until I could get in touch with sales to upgrade my plan. Many services on the VPS wouldn't work until the inodes were increases. Has anyone else experienced this problem?

My fear is that even if I upgrade, I'll run into this problem again.

Why don't you ask in the private VPS forum???

Originally posted by Franki
Why don't you ask in the private VPS forum???

I haven't been there in weeks. When I was, it was pretty empty with seemingly very little traffic. It took days just to even see a response.

That is why I choose to post here instead.

Often if you have a lot of mails in your mail queue that can use up all your inodes. Im surpised the techs didnt recomend to try clearing that.

Originally posted by SplashHost.com
Often if you have a lot of mails in your mail queue that can use up all your inodes. Im surpised the techs didnt recomend to try clearing that. How do you know they didn't either recommend that or just proactively do it for him?

Originally posted by SplashHost.com
Often if you have a lot of mails in your mail queue that can use up all your inodes. Im surpised the techs didnt recomend to try clearing that.


The tech did mention that mail takes up a lot of inodes.. However, I don't get that much mail (except junk mail), or send out that much.

because he said the services didnt work until the amount of inodes was increased.

The tech did mention that mail takes up a lot of inodes.. However, I don't get that much mail (except junk mail), or send out that much.


You should check that out anyway, you might be suprised how much is being used up.

Im surpised the techs didnt recomend to try clearing that.The tech did mention that mail takes up a lot of inodes.. Well what do you know.....:rolleyes:

what kind of applications are you running? i.e., you must have a few dozens of thousands of tiny files on your VPS somewhere, not like it's something that would happen without you knowing...

I have about 7 - 9 thousand files that I'm aware of. I recently added a MySQL database. I notice that my "Var" directory is the one responsible for quickly using up inodes. qmail and mysql is in this directory, so I'm guessing it has to be one of these.

Run 'df -i' to see your inode usage and availability.

It's entirely possible that ServInt simply has this setting too low for real world use. Or perhaps you have a million session files in /tmp. Since you are using qmail, and I presume Maildir/, that is definitely a likely suspect as mentioned before.

Isn't it also possible that the account size is simply too small for the purpose with which it's being utilized?

Which VPS account do you have golfer?

Mysql wouldnt be doing it. Unless you have thousands of tables.

Did they tell you how many inodes you get with each plan?

I think a 'df -i' would be more conclusive than speculation so I'll leave it open to any possibility. That's why my word of choice was "possible".

it's like 200K inodes on essential, multiplied by 2 on each higher plan. system takes around 40-60K depending on setup.

So that's not less than 100,000 inodes mysteriously allocated somewhere - does it look like some runaway script generating empty files? I don't think any regular program can generate this much given only 2gb of disk space.

I'm on the essential plan with 5 total GB of space. I switched most of my sites back to my old dedicated server, because I finally came to the conclusion that a VPS is not for me. My "/home" partition started out with over 300,000 inodes (on the old server). When I switched over to the VPS, it had very little room to grow, which resulted in a crash of many of the services on the VPS.

After taking a look at everything, I came to the conclusion that qmail is not the problem. I think I just have a bunch of files in my /home directory.

Thanks for clearing that up golfer. I'm sure VPS isn't the ideal solution for everyone, this seems like one of those times.

Good luck with your dedicated...:)