Resolving no free inodes space left issue – inode usage full

In production, I faced issue once when servers had no inode space left but disk space was available. This post is about how to troubleshoot such issue.

First of all, we will check disk space usage with $df command

$ df

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda             33030016  10407780  22622236  32% /
tmpfs                   368748         0    368748   0% /lib/init/rw
varrun                  368748        56    368692   1% /var/run
tmpfs                   368748         0    368748   0% /dev/shm

So, lot of disk space available here.

Now, We will do $df –i to check the inode usage. If you have less 100 inode usage that means you should free your inode usage by deleting a huge amount of small unused files.

$ df -i

Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/xvda            2080768 2080768       0  100% /
tmpfs                  92187       3   92184    1% /lib/init/rw
varrun                 92187      38   92149    1% /var/run
varlock                92187       4   92183    1% /var/lock
tmpfs                  92187       1   92186    1% /dev/shm

How will you find them?

for i in /*; do echo $i; find $i |wc -l; done

This will help you to find the number of files in each directory. If you find a huge amount of empty files in any directory, better to delete them.

sudo rm -rf /home/culprit_user/culprit_directory

Use this command to remove them.

Now, check inode usage again using $df -i