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Please help me understand inodes - could you please ELI5 Inodes for me?
Hi, no reason other than curiosity. So I tried reading about inodes on Wikipedia and a couple of hosting sites, and tried a search this forum (perhaps not well) but I can't seem to wrap my head around what this metric is. So maybe thought maybe one of you could ELI5 it to me. When a hosting provider gives specific allocation of inodes, what does this bucket represent? And what is the utilization measurement (or reset) period?
CPU vcore count seems straight forward.
Disk space is straight forward to understand.
Memory allocation is easy.
Bandwidth is self explanatory in that it resets each month.
But what is a unit of inode? What action/non-action does it represent? And when you have a specific number, what timeframe is that usage counted towards before resetting?
Thank you for helping me learn something new today.
Comments
folder? inode
file? inode
symlink? inode
Anything and everything is inode.
If you are in a ball pit, each ball is an inode.
The inode (index node) is a data structure in a Unix-style file system that describes a file-system object such as a file or a directory. Each inode stores the attributes and disk block locations of the object's data. File-system object attributes may include metadata (times of last change, access, modification), as well as owner and permission data.
Directories are lists of names assigned to inodes. A directory contains an entry for itself, its parent, and each of its children.
Got it. So essentially, in addition to the physical disk space limit, you also have an object limit that isn't the same metric in terms of physical occupancy of the disk, but rather the count of the objects? THANKS
Thank you all. In just the few minutes of posting this, I have now learned more than I could have on my own during that time.
So it then makes sense that inodes are not timebound? Asked differently, are they like disk space where the inodes count is what it is and your limit is what it is. And it is unlike bandwidth which is reset after the time-period?
There is no time, your inode lasts until removed.
Thank you! You rock along with everyone else that answered to. I feel like I understand it at a fifth grade level now, which was my goal!
First use of ELI5 I've ever seen. Is that what the kids are using these days?
It's a Reddit thing.
@shahyan Inode is like a rooms in a big hotel. Each room can accomodate bigger or slimmer, small person (files). Each hotel have limited rooms.
In disk storage, depending on how big your storage space is and your file system you get minimum of half a million Inode.
ive seen some shared hosters set a limit on the number of inodes. What happens when we 've reached the inode limit? deleting some files will bring the count back down?
Yes deleting files means the inode count will eventually decrease (when usage metrics are re-calculated)
However some control panels count emails in their inode count to so essentially as above every file,folder, symlink and as each email is also a file they also count towards your inodes too
Chip
Care to explain then what the hell does that mean?
explain like im 5 - eli5
Ah..all the 3 seconds saved not saying it like that in the first place