Filesystem running out of inodes on Laravel app server due to Blade views (view cache)

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on March 24th 2025 - last updated on March 24th 2025 - Listed in PHP Linux

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Usually application servers run out of disk space due to large files (logs for example) and them using more and more space. However there's also the possibility when a file system can run out of inodes (basically explained: the limit of number of files). This so happened recently on an application server running the Laravel framework on top of PHP.

Inodes fully used

Obviously our monitoring alerted that the number of free inodes (in percent) went under the thresholds.

DISK CRITICAL - free space: / 31544 MB (57% inode=0%);

This is a rather rare event, even for my meanwhile 25 years of Linux and Unix experience. File systems running out of space: Happens quite often. But running out of inodes? Yeah, that's rare.

From the output above we can see that there's still over 30 GB available space on that file system - but inodes are fully used. For something like this to happen we're talking about several millions of files inside that file system. But... where are they?

Using du to locate the largest inode allocations

The du command is helpful to find which directory uses a lot of space. I'm using this command quite a lot. However in this case du is used to find the number of inodes used by (sub-) directories:

root@linux:/var/www# du --inodes -S | sort -rh | sed -n \
        '1,50{/^.\{71\}/s/^\(.\{30\}\).*\(.\{37\}\)$/\1...\2/;p}'
3483020    ./www.example.com/storage/framework/views
892    ./www.example.com/vendor/spatie/schema-org/src
892    ./beta.example.com/vendor/spatie/schema-org/src
886    ./www.example.com/vendor/spatie/schema-org/src/Contracts
886    ./beta.example.com/vendor/spatie/schema-org/src/Contracts
[...]

Holy cow! There are more than 3 million files under the production's application, within the storage/framework/views path.

The fact that this is located under a /storage path is a hint that this is (most likely) a Laravel application.

The Laravel view cache

A very good blog post from Tinkerwell App describes the Laravel caches and how to clean them. One of these caches is the so-called "view" cache:

Another part of the application that has a cache is the view cache. The view cache stores rendered Blade templates to speed up your application. You can manually render all views to increase the performance by using the artisan command for it:

php artisan view:cache

Over the time these rendered Blade templates have created over 3 million files... Let's manually render those views as described:

root@linux:/var/www/www.example.com# php8.1 artisan view:cache
   INFO  Blade templates cached successfully.  

According to the output, all the different Blade template views have now been cached. Wait... So they weren't cached before?!

Let's have a new look at the inode usage:

root@linux:~# df -i /
Filesystem        Type Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/vgdata/linux ext4   3.5M  120K  3.4M    4% /

Wow. Suddenly there are 3.4 Million inodes available again!

On that particular views path, there are now significantly less files around:

root@linux:~# du --inodes -S /var/www/www.example.com/storage/framework/views/
3356    /var/www/www.example.com/storage/framework/views/

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