Re: Files per directory
Glynn Clements <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.linux.admin |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Yuri Csapo wrote: > > Is that going to cause performance issues? The current file system > > ext3. Would anyone suggest a limit I should set for the maximum or > > say if they think 10K files is acceptable? > > I'm no expert but the answer is probably: "depends on the application." > > As far as I know there's no limit to the number of files in a directory > currently in ext3. There IS a limit to the number of files (actually > inodes) in the whole filesystem, which is a completely different thing. ext3 also has a limit of 32000 hard links, which means that a directory can't have more than 31998 subdirectories. However, the original poster wasn't asking about hard limits, but efficiency. If the filesystem wasn't created with the dir_index option, then having thousands of files in a directory will be a major performance problem, as any lookups will scan the directory linearly. Even with the dir_index option, large directories could be an issue. I think that you would really need to conduct tests to see exactly how much of an issue. OTOH, even if you keep the directories small, a database consisting of many small files will be much slower than e.g. BerkeleyDB or DBM. -- Glynn Clements <[email protected]> -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-admin" in the body of a message to [email protected] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html