My Cpanel informed me that my Inodes were in the Red zone. Whaat? I didnt even know I had any Inodes.... What where they and what were the sneaky little blighters doing multiplying away all by themselves. I hadn't done anything much on my website for years. It was all pretty well self maintaining wasn't it?
Simple Inode Reduction Methods
I googled it & found out it is just a fancy name for a file size limit. Each Inode is a single file... Ok this should be easy. Just reduce the amount of files. I cleaned out all the obvious things like EMAILS and files in my junk folder in my Cpanel File Manager. I also cleaned out thousands of un-moderated spam forum replies that had been languishing for years in my blog before I turned the respond feature off.
Inode level still in Red zone
I checked after the clean-out and I had reduced it by 5%. I needed about a 25% reduction to be down to the blue safety zone (there is a yellow caution zone in-between). I needed to do something else. What about temp folders and files that aren't actually needed by my website?
RVsitebuilder Issue with Temp File Creation
I checked and the culprit was Rvsitebuilder. I am not sure if it is due to a glitch or something malicious but there is a temp folder buried within the Rvsitebuilder/Websitepublish/(my sites code number) Var/tmp folder. This single folder contained a heap of Temporary files that I deleted. It carries about one year of temp files and on some days creates a dozen and on other days thousands. Unfortunately File Manager is really clunky and keeps freezing when you try to delete too many files at one time. Fire-fox then freezes and dies and requiring multiple log-ins and so many small deletions are required rather than one large Quick-fix. 2 hours later and I had managed to delete 52,000 files, getting my Inoded down from 161,000 to 109,000. I still have a bit of work to do, but at least I am down into the "Blue zone" again. All I now need to do is find out why RVsitebuilder created these files in the first place.