What is the max inode limit for Linode VPS?

There is no limit to inodes specific to Linode. It does depend on the filesystem formatting options you use (which you can format your own filesystem on Linode if you want). We do use sane defaults when we create the filesystems for our distribution templates - unless you're doing something crazy you shouldn't need to do anything.

Hope that helps,

-Chris

The short answer is you should be able to get what you need, but you may or may need to take extra steps or manually control your filesystems.

With Linode, your filesystem is completely local to your Linode so you can configure it however you may like - there's no externally imposed inode limit, nor is your filesystem shared with other Linodes. However, using the Linode Manager to create your disk volumes will generate ext3 filesystems with (I believe) default inode allocations, which may or may not be sufficient for your use case.

For most uses, you'll run out of space before you run out of inodes, but if you know you are generating a ton of very tiny files, that may not be true with the default allocations. For example, on one of my Linodes, a 2GB disk image has a filesystem with about 130K inodes, while a 12GB disk image has about 1.67M.

But worst case, you can instead opt to generate raw disk images and then manually manage the filesystem creation on top of them however you like (even if ext3 since I don't think you can increase the inode allocation after the fact with tune2fs).

Note that if you opt for a filesystem other than ext2/3 the Linode backup system won't be able to backup that image (in case that's a feature you want to use).

At the least you could go ahead and try out a test Linode and see how the defaults match up against what you may need.

– David