Check Inode usage for a cPanel Account
An inode is a record in a disk table which is used to keep information about a file on your hosting account. So in simple words, the number of inodes indicates the number of files and folders you have. This includes everything on your account, emails, files, and basically everything stored under the server which comes under your permission.
If you have reached the inode limit, then you will not be able to upload new files, recieve emails and much less access the websites correctly. So how do we know that the reason any of these issues occur is due to the inode limit being maxed out?. Well, there are many methods to do it. Let’s start with the simplest.
In a cPanel server, you can view the inode usage of your account in the statistics bar shown to the left by the name “File Usage”. If you are unable to locate the metrics, then it means probably your host might not have enabled it.
If you are on a VPS/Dedicated server (have root access), then you can enable it at through WHM >> Tweak Settings >> Display File Usage information in the cPanel stats bar (inode count)
If your host does not enable this settings or else if you have SSH Access to your account, then you can find the inode usage of your account by issuing the following command.
What this command does is that it first navigates to the home directory of the user and then finds all files under the account and lists its count. As we discussed earlier, inodes are equal to the number of files under an account so the count of the files equals the inodes used.
76548
To get a detailed report about the inode usage that is which folders are using up more inodes, you can issue the following command.
Detailed Inode usage for: /home/user123
524 – .cagefs
3 – .cl.selector
139 – .cpanel
6 – .cphorde
2 – .fontconfig
417 – .gem
5 – .gnupg
5 – .htpasswds
2 – .pki
16 – .softaculous
1 – .sqmailattach
7 – .sqmaildata
7 – .ssh
12 – .trash
2 – .vim
36 – etc
38 – logs
2605 – mail
1 – perl5
2 – public_ftp
66129 – public_html
5846 – ruby
5 – softaculous_backups
11 – ssl
2 – tempdir
708 – tmp
Total: 76549
If you are on a dedicated server/VPS having root access to your system, then you can find the inode usage of your account using a simpler command
Eg:
Disk quotas for user user123 (uid 1216):
Filesystem blocks quota limit grace files quota limit grace
/dev/sda6 124 3000M 3000M 93 0 0
/dev/sda8 2634M 3000M 3000M 76547 0 0
/dev/sda2 76 3000M 3000M 25 0 0