listing a huge amount of file on one file system

[Esquivel, Vicente]

Can anyone tell me if they have experienced long waits while trying to
list a directory with a huge amount of files in it?  
 
One of our servers that is running on RHEL 4, has a directory that
contains over 2 millions files in it and growing.  The files are all
small files in size but there are a lot of them due to the application
that runs on this server.    I have tried to do an "ls" and "ls -l"
command inside of that directory but it just seems to run for a long
time with not output, I am assuming that if I leave it running long
enough it will eventually list them all.  I was just wondering if anyone
has seen this before or have a better way of getting a listing of all
the files inside a directory like that.
 
Thanks all
Vince