How many files can I have safely in a subdirectory?

[z0diac]

Thanks!  And thanks to all who have replied to this thread!  I will see if I
can get dir_index active.



Bugzilla from criley at erad.com wrote:
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> I'm not sure if it's still the case, but there used to be a limit to how
> many subdirectories a directory can have.  32k, to be exact.  We ended up
> creating our own (application level) directory hashing algorithm to work
> around it several years ago.  This might only be a kernel 2.4 thing
> though.
> 
> I'm unaware of any limit to number of files.  However once the number of
> files in a directory gets above about 64k, filesystem performance will
> significantly decrease unless the filesystem has the dir_index option. 
> dir_index can be specified at filesystem creation or added later using
> tune2fs (an fsck is required).
> 
> Charles
> 
> Charles Riley
> eRAD, Inc.
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "z0diac" <web2009 at zeroreality.com>
> To: ext3-users at redhat.com
> Sent: Sunday, August 30, 2009 12:00:12 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: How many files can I have safely in a subdirectory?
> 
> 
> Ok, I'm running a vBulletin forum (3.8.4) and found that all user
> attachments
> go into 1 single directory for each user. For each attached file in the
> forum, there's 2 files on disk (*.attach and *.thumb), for pictures that
> is.
> 
> One user already has over 100,000 attachements, thus, over 200,000 files
> in
> his attach directory.
> 
> Someone recently told me to 'keep an eye on it' because certain setups
> can't
> hold more than X number of files in a single directory. Yet someone else
> said I could have over 1 trillion files in a single directory if the HDD
> was
> large enough...
> 
> Here's my setup:
> 
> linux version: 2.6.18-92.1.10.el5
> php: 5.1.6
> mySQL: 5.0.45
> File system: ext3
> 
> vB support has told me any limitation there might be, will not be the
> result
> of vB, so now I'm looking at either Linux and the way it handles files, or
> the ext3 file system.
> 
> Does anyone know if I can just keep going with putting files into one
> directory? (there will be over 1million probably by year's end. Hopefully
> not more than 5 million ever).
> 
> And, will having so many files in a single directory cause any performance
> problems? (ie: slowdowns)
> 
> My only option is to hire a coder to somehow have it split the 1M+ files
> into several subdirs, say 50,000 per subdir. But even though it's messy,
> if
> it really doesn't make a difference in the end whether they're in 50
> subdirs, or just 1 dir, then I won't bother (and can sigh a breath of
> relief)
> 
> 
> Thanks in advance!!
> z0diac is offline   	
> Looking for Linux Hosting? Click Here.
> 
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