RE: Running out of inodes on an NFS which stores repos

From

rsbecker@nexbridge.com <rsbecker@nexbridge.com>

Date

Sep 6, 2025, 15:28 UTC

Message-ID

<03d101dc1f42$e5380a70$afa81f50$@nexbridge.com>

In-Reply-To

<20250906141711.64419-1-five231003@gmail.com>

On September 6, 2025 10:16 AM, Kousik Sanagavarapu wrote:

>Hello everyone,
>At my $(DAYJOB), we have an NFS which stores different git repos.
>Due to how git stores objects, we have started to run out of inodes on the

NFS as

>the number of repos coming into the NFS increased.
>
>These git repos come from another service and there are typically thousands

of

>them each day. It is important to note that we only store the .git dir and

expose a url

>which is configured as the remote by default to read and write into this

repo.

>
>All of these are small repos; usually not many files and not many commits

too - I'd

>say ~5 commits on average.
>
>Historically, when we ran out of inodes, we had implemented a few

strategies

>where we used to repack the objects or archive the older repos and move

them into

>another store and bring them back into this NFS and unarchive the repo.
>
>However, none of these totally mitigated the issue and we still run into

issue as the

>traffic increases. As a last resort,  we increased the disk size even

though there was

>ton of free space left - just for increasing the number of inodes.
>
>We can't delete any of these repos, no matter how old, because they are

valuable

>data.
>
>I was wondering if there was some other strategy that we could implement

here as

>this seems like a problem that people might often run into. It would really

help to

>here your thoughts or if you could point me to anywhere else.

I would suggest running

git gc --aggressive