I am getting errors on my website and my website inodes count is overload. The hosting inodes limit is 200,000 but my website inodes count is 909,496 and I can't even open phpMyAdmin. The hosting support asked me to remove unused files. How can I decrease the inodes count and which files are unused in Magento based website?
Usually an indicator that you need a more capable hosting provider.
The major places that Magento creates files during operation are in the var/ folder and your product image cache.
If you've never checked before, the following areas can accumulate a phenomenal amount of detritus. Using an ftp client, check the following areas in your var/ folder:
Check that you don't have a bazillion sessions files in var/session, remove anything older than current date
Check that there aren't an excessive amount of files in var/report, you might want to find out why Magento is generating them and fix the issue. Delete them all.
Logging will generate over time several huge files in var/log, delete them and then look at the new ones to find out what errors are being generated.
Imports and other stuff can cause temporary files to accumulate in var/tmp, delete them. Also check in var/import for old imports that can be deleted
Stored database backups are kept in var/backup, using the admin backend System > Tools > Backups:
Magento uses a lot of caching to store information, the biggest will be the Image Cache if you have a large catalog, and it will contain cached images from the beginning of time, and lots of useless ones if you've deleted product over time. Using the Admin backend, go into System > Cache Management:
Clear the Magento Cache.
Flush Catalog Images Cache.
Magento does not delete product images when you delete product. In fact Magento would be a prime candidate for appearing on one of those Hoarder programs that were prevalent on TV there for a while.
Hopefully this will have reduced your inode count enough to carry out the following operations. Before proceeding, do a couple database backups and store off server!!!
Next step is to ask your hosting provider if they include your database in that inode table count. If they do, you are kind of stuck as Magento uses innodb and likely, they've cheaply not set up MySQL to use files-per-table so you can resize the innodb file size by optimizing each table. Ask them if they use files-per-table when they set up MySQL, if they don't know what it is, develop that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach.
Some tables that get excessively huge, especially if you've haven't properly set set up the Magento master cron job trigger in your cPanel and checked to make sure log table cleaning is enabled in System > Configuration > Advanced > System > Log Cleaning. These tables are as follows:
'dataflow_batch_export',
'dataflow_batch_import',
'log_customer',
'log_quote',
'log_summary',
'log_summary_type',
'log_url',
'log_url_info',
'log_visitor',
'log_visitor_info',
'log_visitor_online',
'index_event',
'report_event',
'report_viewed_product_index',
'report_compared_product_index',
'catalog_compare_item',
'catalogindex_aggregation',
'catalogindex_aggregation_tag',
'catalogindex_aggregation_to_tag'
Magento has a built-in script to clean the logs. If running this crashes with a memory error because you've never set the cron job up and there's too much bloat to clean out, Crucial Web Host has a script that can be run to manually delete all log file contents. including the dataflow tables which won't be cleaned out by the Magento log cleaning process. If you use dataflow import/export a lot, Nexcess has a script that can check on the dataflow tables size and clear them as well.
After cleaning the database, you will need to use phpMyAdmin to optimize each table in your Magento database. If the hosting provider hasn't set up files-per-table in MySQL, it will do squat for reducing your inode count.
After all that, don't bother messing with deleting application files or anything else Magento uses. It doesn't really accumulate that much aside from the var/ folders and the Image cache and you likely will end up with a dead website.
At this point, you're at the mercy of a shared server hosting plan that has decided to be fair to everyone by limiting what can be done in each account and doesn't allow enough resources to run Magento. Start looking for a hosting provider that supports Magento, often they don't bother limiting your inode count (a cheap trick to allow too many people to share a hard drive) as they offer plenty of disk space for you to run your e-commerce website.