Can I increase inode count in Linux?

You can set the number of inodes available in a tmpfs with the nr_inodes mount option. To do this live, you can just run:

mount -o remount,nr_inodes=<bignum> /tmp

I suspect that setting this number very, very large will result in a lot of memory consumption, so be careful.

If the inode count is your actual issue, you can increase the amount of available inodes for the tmpfs filesystem with the nr_inodes mount option. If you set nr_inodes=0 , then there will be unlimited inodes.

All this information is in the tmpfs kernel documentation.

See womble's answer for remount example. For boot, you will need to edit your fstab, or whatever does this for your particular Linux build so future mounts are handled correctly.