INODES question

[rcg_01es]

Hello... I have a doubt about one thing I have read at Hostgator TOS. It's this:

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7b.) INODES
The use of more then 50,000 INODES will result in account suspension. Accounts found exceeding 50,000 INODES will not be backed up on our backup servers. A INODE is the actual file or directory and not the size of that file or directory. For example your index.html file is 1 INODE. A directory called homework is counted as 1 INODE as well.

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What does it mean? Can't I have more than 50000 files in my hosting account, even if they are under the total disk space I have been assigned?

Thank you for your help!.

[Sam]

It means you cant have more than 50,000 files/folders in your account even if your still within you diskspace

[rcg_01es]

Originally Posted by _Sam_

It means you cant have more than 50,000 files/folders in your account even if your still within you diskspace

Then I think this is a much more restrictive limitation than disk space or bandwidth. Isn't it?

[Serra]

Originally Posted by rcg_01es

Then I think this is a much more restrictive limitation than disk space or bandwidth. Isn't it?

50k files is a LOT of files.

[jojoyohan]

They have also stated that they will only use limit to suspend you if your amount of files is damaging the integrity of the server.

[slapshotw]

Originally Posted by rcg_01es

Then I think this is a much more restrictive limitation than disk space or bandwidth. Isn't it?

I would think it'd be VERY hard to pass this limit, especially on a database site (which most large sites are).

[charlesgan]

its quit impossible to pass this files limit.
the limit is placed, because when your account is hittin huge number of files and folders, and total up to ten of thousand... accessing those files and folders take up too many cpu resource and also memory.

thus, the limit is here, to prevent 'abuse' that will result in over usage of resource.

[riostyles]

Have an account not being so far having about 20 emails using only webmail and holding the mails on the server. Each mail is about 2 files.

[Serra]

It would be possible to pass the 50k limit if all of someone's emails were stored online. As pointed out, that would only be about 24k emails. Saving 200 email a day on line, a user would run out of INODES in less than a year.


However, I have a customer that stores emails online and in three years they have only been able to save 35k Inodes worth of mail.

[GatorDaveC]

We rarely enforce the inode usage rule in our terms of service. It is used only when a client is hurting the health of the partition. One case of this would be the Versa server outage a couple of days ago ( http://forums.hostgator.com/showthread.php?t=17041 ).

In the case of versa, a client had used over 2 million inodes, and was constantly deleting and
recreating those files. This ended up causing their home directory to become corrupt.

You may be wondering how their directory being corrupt could affect you. Well the FileSystem doesn't know where those files and directories (inodes) are supposed to go. Running a filesystem check will most likely move the files into what's called "lost+found". Since this user had over 2 million unattached indodes, this takes quite a while to clean up, and it causes problems for everyone. This is a prime example of why it was necessary to add this to our TOS.

Anyway, I'm going to get some sleep!

[Serra]

Originally Posted by GatorDaveC

We rarely enforce the inode usage rule in our terms of service. It is used only when a client is hurting the health of the partition. One case of this would be the Versa server outage a couple of days ago ( http://forums.hostgator.com/showthread.php?t=17041 ).

Some sites might find the 50k limit a bit small, but I think that the average user gets it. There is a limit to the number of INODES that can be used in the shared environment.

I have a site that had 250k INODES and it was very difficult to work with. I can't imagine the trouble with 2 million!