Unexplained Inodes' Usage

I noticed an unexplained inodes’ usage on my webhost account lately. When I first noticed it, my account was breaching 90% of the inodes’ limit.

I did some housekeeping to keep the count low. It was usually around 80%-ish, but after some housekeeping and a couple of uninstall, I only managed to trim it down to 85%. I thought that was it, but it kept growing, by the minute.

I logged the growth and the usage seems to be growing every five to seven minutes, increasing by the dozens. The last thing I did before this anomaly was activating LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress (LSCWP).

I disabled this, and re-enabled WP Super Cache, but the issue still persists. I then disabled all caching, to no effect. I then contacted my webhost provider for assistance, in tracking which folder(s) could be responsible for unexplained inodes’ usage.

The culprit was Magento sessions’ log files. My server was being taxed heavily with aggressive Chinese crawlers and bots. The last time an unexplained inodes’ usage happened, I deleted an in-use database by mistake. This time I had to implement User Agents blocks at the .htaccess file because these crawlers/bots weren’t respecting robots.txt settings.

############################################
## enable rewrites
## add Chinese bots here ##
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Mb2345Browser|LieBaoFast|zh-CN|MicroMessenger|zh_CN|Kinza|Datanyze|serpstatbot|spaziodati|OPPO\sA33|AspiegelBot|aspiegel|PetalBot|Bytespider|ByteDance|Baiduspider|360Spider|Yisouspider|AhrefsBot|SemrushBot|Googlebot|Dotbot|SeekportBot [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [F,L]
## add Chinese bots here ##
############################################

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