Linux – Determine Location of Inode Usage

disk-space-utilizationinodelinux

I recently installed Munin on a development web server to keep track of system usage. I've noticted that the system's inode usage is climbing by about 7-8% per day even though the disk usage has barely increased at all. I'm guessing something is writing a ton of tiny files but I can't find what / where.

I know how to find disk space usage but I can't seem to find a way to summarize inode usage.

Is there a good way to determine inode usage by directory so I can locate the source of the usage?

Best Answer

Don't expect this to run quickly...

cd to a directory where you suspect there might be a subdirectory with lots of inodes. If this script takes a huge amount of time, you've likely found where in the filesystem to look. /var is a good start...

Otherwise, if you change to the top directory in that filesystem and run this and wait for it to finish, you'll find the directory with all the inodes.

find . -type d | 
while 
  read line  
do 
  echo "$( find "$line" -maxdepth 1 | wc -l) $line"  
done | 
sort -rn | less

I'm not worried about the cost of sorting. I ran a test and sorting through the unsorted output of that against 350,000 directories took 8 seconds. The initial find took . The real cost is opening all these directories in the while loop. (the loop itself takes 22 seconds). (The test data was run on a subdirectory with 350,000 directories, one of which had a million files, the rest had between 1 and 15 directories).

Various people had pointed out that ls is not great at that because it sorts the output. I had tried echo, but that is also not great. Someone else had pointed out that stat gives this info (number of directory entries) but that it isn't portable. It turns out that find -maxdepth is really fast at opening directories and counts .files, so... here it is.. points for everyone!

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