When you upload pages to your site, you know how many files and directories there are. If you check your email, the number of emails will give you an additional inode count. As long as in your site you are only going to have files uploaded by you and email accounts, you won’t probably need to worry about inodes. The problem appears if you are planning on having a blog, a forum, a content-management system or any other software package. These packages all have a large quantity of files even just installed. And some are made in such a way as to generate many additional files when you start using them.

Example-case: a basic Moodle installation, with menus only in English and no courses, has 4,850 inodes approximately to start with. If you upload 30 courses, this number goes up to 11,000 inodes. And that’s without any students (real example taken from here). 30 courses are loads. Ok, another example: one Moodle platform with “only” 7 courses BUT 500 students has 20,000 inodes (example taken from here). The reason is that every time a student uploads an exercise, Moodle creates two inodes: one corresponding to the student’s folder inside the exercise folder, and one corresponding to the actual exercise. 5 exercises, 10 inodes. 500 students doing the 5 exercises, 5,000 inodes. And it keeps growing… Furthermore, each language pack has over 600 inodes. So if you want to support different languages, be aware of how the number of inodes is going to increase even more. So knowing this, it is wise not to have more than one Moodle installation in a single web hosting account if you want to have many students. But if you don’t know about inodes, you might get a web hosting package with loads of disk space and as many mysql databases as you want, install Moodle, b2evolution and say Joomla and collapse your server in no time.

I have not been able to find a list of the inodes all well-known packages have to start with. I think this information is important to be able to decide what hosting account to get or how to use your hosting accounts in a more efficient way (for example combine Moodle and a few small scale web pages in a server and a forum and a blog in another). Therefore I have set upon myself the task of compiling an inode count list as complete as possible. At the initial release of this post, the table is far from complete. I will be adding more entries to the table as I find out the number of inodes each installation comes with. If you find out any additional data, do let me know, and I’ll add it to the list. Also, if you’d like me to find out the inode count of any program I don’t have yet, drop me a note as well, and I’ll see what can I do.

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