Versionpress can fill the entire HDD with lots of inodes

[AllenEllis]

Hi all,

Sorry for the lack of details -- this happened a few months ago but I wanted to report it from memory since I don't see any issues about it.

I was running versionpress on four fairly low traffic Wordpress blogs that were on a small Linode VPS for about a year. All four of them started throwing odd errors one day, about unable to write files to the disk.

The disk was only 50% used in terms of bytes, but it turned out the number of "inodes" in use was completely full. It turns out that the versionpress .git directory for each site had many thousands of tiny files inside, which apparently prevented the OS from writing any new files.

The only way I could get control of the server again was to purge lots of commit histories for several of the sites.

I don't know what an easy fix here is or what I'm even actually proposing. Obviously it would be great if versionpress could anticipate the OS running low on inodes and then either stop writing new commits or potentially purge old commits. Though honestly, that almost seems out of scope for versionpress and it something that Git itself should solve.

Also the fact that no one else has reported this suggests maybe it is an uncommon issue and not worth of much attention.

[borekb]

Hi, thanks for reporting this, it can indeed happen as the way VersionPress is designed can lead to tons of small files in the Git repo. Usually, Git packs these files into fewer Packfiles but maybe it was not happening on your server.