Running out of inodes on an NFS which stores repos

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.

Thanks