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Out of curiosity, can you share what platform/file system you generally use? I had assumed inodes would not be an issue with modern operating systems; especiall

• kazinator 10y ago
  On traditional Unix filesystems, a fixed number of inodes is provisioned when a filesystem is created. Though of course the upper bound on that is limited by the width of the numeric type ino_t (or whatever plays that role in kernel space) have you, in practice, the actual limit is lower. I'm looking at a filesystem I have handy here; the root FS in an Ubuntu Linux VM. dumpe2fs /dev/sda1 says that the inode count is 1146880. Just a million and something: way less than what a even a 32 bit inode number can represent. That filesystem simply cannot have more objects than that, in total. With this type of filesystem, you have to estimate how many objects you will ever need to store in it, not only how much total storage. If you estimate too high, you waste inodes. Suppose inodes are 128 bytes wide and you provision four billion of them. Oops, that's like half a terabyte of storage dedicated to the array of inodes!