This one is going to get a little bit technical, so try to keep with me.
As with the vast majority of the web, this site is hosted on a Linux based server. Of course, like any computer, this has practical, and logistical limitations. My hosting package is pretty nice and quite liberal with what I can do (within reason) but one limitation has always bothered me: an inode cap of 250,000.
What the hell does that mean? In very simple terms, I can have about 250,000 files on the server before the hosting company will get a little ticked. What an inode actually is is a little more complex than that, but this explanation keeps things simple. This isn’t just some arbitrary limitation, either – that’s actually, as it sounds like, an incredible number of files to have loaded onto a server. This, of course, includes every single file on the server, too – every script, every page, every random data file, and, as pertinent here, every single image you upload.
Quite the clutter, or so it seems, but consider this – over 3000 inodes aren’t even in the WordPress install!
What’s more, for the hosting companies backups, they prefer you to keep under 100,000, or they won’t backup the site files on their end. That’s the limit that really gets me, and thanks to that, I’ve wanted to keep down the number of files I’ve kept on the server, including pulling much of the “legacy” data that some old web sites still link to (eh, no one wanted those old games anyway, right?)
I’m still fine on backups, but note the inode count – it jumped to 9894 after I uploaded 3 images for this article!
Anyway, what does this have to do with me uploading images to the site? Well, there’s a funny little quirk about how WordPress does images – depending on the size of the image you upload, you won’t just have that original file on the server – you will also wind up with multiple versions of the file at varying sizes, easily 3 or 4 different ones in addition to your original file!
So, you can see how I would begin to get concerned when writing an article that might have 4 or 5 images – that suddenly becomes 20 or so files on the server!
Now, in retrospect, I overthought the problem, but look at it from my point of view – as it stands right now, the site is using just under 10,000 inodes. For whatever reason over the past few years, I thought that, as I sped up my article rate, I would wind up hitting the 100,000 rate faster than I intended to – it was somewhere around 9000 when I began to get concerned about a year and a half ago when I originally increased my publishing rate.
I thought “If I’m at 9000 now, where will I be after a couple of years?” That’s when I cleaned up some old files and tried to avoid putting new images into articles where possible, and also for a few articles more recently where I used 3rd party hosting to keep things clean on the site.
What I failed to consider was something pretty obvious – the bulk of these 9000+ files were actually in the software on the site; not in random images. In fact, in 2016, I had created just under 1500 inodes in the uploads folder for that year. For 2017 I’ve only produced just over 700 as of this writing – obviously a side effect of me cutting back on image uploads, and while still a seemingly high number, nowhere near as high as I was thinking I would produce in a year (which I honestly thought, thanks to the sudden shift in my writing frequency, would be more like 5000 or more!)
The reality of the monthly inode usage is far less severe than I (for some reason) expected!
So, let’s say I was to push out about 2000 inodes a year – I’d hit the 100,000 inode barrier in, oh, 50 years. This means realistically, while I would naturally want to save on image uploads where I can, for sanity sake, when I do have something “big” to share, I don’t need to hold back – throw all the images I feel I need to in there, what the hell does it matter!? I’ll have space left over.
This, of course, as I mentioned above, comes from my amazing ability to overthink a problem and also my ability to forget to look at the individual year folders to discern how many files I’m actually creating in a given month, or year!
Yeah, that’s about typical for me. I just thought some people might get a laugh out of this – especially those who run their own websites and know exactly what I’m talking about!