Quick Question: How many files can you have in a Linux Server folder?

[$5 submissions]

I'm building thousands of pages but the way the script is designed, all the html files must be in one directory. Anyone know if there's a limit in Linux re how many files can be in a directory?

[Jace]

i have had upwards of 15,000 before...never had a problem

[Nembrionic]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...irectory+linux


will give this as one of the pages:
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/lin...05.0/0164.html

now that was hard! :D

[Nembrionic]

Ofcourse it depends on your FS and maybe even your linux flavor

[$5 submissions]

i have had upwards of 15,000 before...never had a problem

Thanks, Jace, much appreciated.

[mortenb]

I recently saw a system getting unstable at around 30k pics in a folder

[toddler]

it depends more on how your server parses the files vs just the raw counts. For longterm managability, use sub dirs. scripts parsing many thousands of files in a single directory could very well have problems with the size of the arrays. Use sub dirs...

[azguy]

Depends on the Linux distro and kernel version, but I don't think you'll have a problem any time soon

[fuzebox]

The limit under ext3 is 32768 files/subdirectorys in one directory

[zagi]

The limits change from one OS to another, but one thing is true, Unix + Linux is notoriously bad with a large number of files in one directory.

I would have to estimate the upper limit between 20,000 - 30,000 after that performance suffers heavily. Yes the script may not use sub directories but it can always be modified. Usuaully you wont notice until its too late and then rewriting + sorting archived files is a big pain.

Take this into account before going production with this system would be my advice.

Under FreeBSD you can tune the following sysctl variables to increase performance for large # of files in a directory:

vfs.ufs.dirhash_minsize: 2560
vfs.ufs.dirhash_maxmem: 2097152

[swedguy]

32,768 for both ext2 and ext3. I found that out the hard way with an old redirecting service

[goBigtime]

If you have to ask that question, then you should probably rework your application to use subdirs. Dealing with directories with that many files can waste a lot of resources.

The easiest way might be to create folders named 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z and rewrite your script to seek/store the files in that manner.

But it really depends on your application and file naming scheme.

[esteve]

I have about 150,000 files under a folder in windows, No they're not all in one huge line but /asian/10/ /anal/01/
dunno if that helps