W3 Total cache creates tens of thousands inodes

I forgot to say, I have already tried clearing all caches multiple times.

Besides this issue the site works well and fast, but this issue is going to get my account suspended.

Disable Database cache in W3TC until fixed.

Then delete those files.

I also noticed a large number of directories and files under the object cache folder.
Do I have to disable it as well?

Finally, I noticed that depsite W3TC being installed on all my sites, on some sites I only got a “cache” folder under wp-content while others have both a “cache” and a “w3tc” folder containing similar structure.
Can I delete some of that?

Thanks in advance.

Same here.. I come home from a business trip today to find a disk warning from my server. Thankfully, my tech team is working with me, but this is ridiculous.

This plugin has been more hassle than what it’s worth.

Me too affected. The inode count has gone well above 500,000 in my account (where I host 10 sites). This could have very well resulted in the suspension of the account at least temporarily.

Fortunately our host understands this. A comment from our host is: “… this is a known issue with W3Total Cache …” .

No response from the author for more than 24 hours here? This is ridiculous while he deserves every respect for creating a plugin downloaded by about 1.7 million users as of today.

My host has recommended for using ‘WP Super Cache’ and I am going to switch over to it, due to this issue. Sorry, I cannot afford it anymore…

Me too affected. The inode count has gone well above 500,000 ……

UPDATE:

Considering the overall popularity the w3tc plugin still enjoys, I decided to review my decision in discarding it, and found the post https://forums.hostgator.com/wordpress-w3-settings-t146131.html There, one of HG’s staff has recommended the use of a proper setting of w3tc at https://projects.pithyphrase.net/w3settings .

I downloaded the file and uploaded it to one of my sites, AFTER I deleted the initial ”cache” folder created by the plugin. The inode count came down. After this, I implemented the same for all of my sites and as a result, the final inode count is about 40,000 compared to the previous value of more than 500,000 !!

This means, a wrong setting (by me) could have affected me. I am using shared hosting.

I am posting this for the reference of anyone who may face the same problem in future.

Hats off to the creator of W3TC.

The same issue here. I have a site with several thousands posts and in a single week (from the last plugin update) more than 200.000 inodes were created. I noticed that the upgrade overwrote the original configurations so I configured the W3TC again (disabled db and object cache, turned on disk enhanced cache etc.) but the issue still exists. Many thousands of inodes are created every day.

To be worse, feature for cleaning all caches seems doesn’t work at all. Before this last version, I was able to go to Performance > Empty All Caches and all cached files would be deleted. Now, I need to clean wp-content/cache/page_enhanced folder manually or via cron job every single day in order to prevent cancellation of my account due to the huge amount of inodes.

Is there any fix for this problem or I need to change cache plugin?

same here

@QuickSolution, the solution you provided doesn’t work anymore, it was successful only with the earlier W3TC version. Here is the comment from the author of the config file

…Update 10 March 2013: W3 Total Cache has released a few new versions since this was written and they now use a different config file layout, so this is probably obsolete…

[sig moderated as per the Forum Rules]

I would like to hear an official response to this

With the temperamental tendencies of using this caching plugin and the latest extra bloat in the admin panel I’ve opted to uninstall it and use another. Sorry Frederick, but my life and time spent has been better since.

This restrained tutorial from wpbeginner is also good, but in essence, for a shared host it’s good to have the Page Cache enabled on Disk Enhanced and Database Cache and Object cache disabled.

@daniel, if you had read what I wrote, you could have seen that I did all of these. In short the plugin worked good before v0.9.2.8, and now it crates thousands of files without possibility to delete them (except manually).

I ran into this same issue today on Bluehost and they just suspended my account. Now I have to delete all the cache files before they bring the site back online. The client is pissed and now I’m working on a Sunday. I think I’ll be disabling W3TC for now until I can figure out the issue.

@devin Walker

I too had the issue on Bluehost and they too treatened to suspend the account.

By the way is the project still active? It’s a long time since the last update.