Troubleshooting Inodes Usage on cPanel and CloudLinux

An Inode is a data structure used to store the metadata of a file. in cPanel – inode number represents the collective number of files and folders present in your web hosting account.

Check Inode usage inside cPanel

Most cpanel hosting providers provide an Inodes / File Usage widget:

Check Inode usage from SSH

To check inode number of a single file or folder:

# ls -li file-name-here

Check total Inode usage via SSH for a single cPanel user:

find . | wc -l

Inode count of each subdirectory:

find . -printf "%h\n" | cut -d/ -f-2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

How to decrease Inode Usage in cPanel

Here are some of the most common ways to lower inode usage in Cpanel:

Clear the .trash

Empty the trash bin regularly.

Clear the cache files

cPanel >> LiteSpeed

Remove unnecessary files

cPanel >> FileManager

Clear old emails

cPanel >> Email Disk Usage