How many files can a server/HD/directory handle?
 

I'm using a total of 2G on a 66G harddrive but am getting disk quota errors. The host says that it's out of "inodes" and that there's too many files. I just can't see that. There's 32 sites on there, the majority of which have maybe 30 files tops. Then there's maybe 2-3 sites with say 10k files at most. And 3-5 with maybe 1k files.

That sounds fine, most likely their reading the quota incorrectly or setting a very restrictive amount of inodes as compared to disk space.

There is no real limit, or if there is its EXTREMELY large, however for performance you'd want to have less than 10,000 files / directory.

I think I have a couple directories with around 7k files. But everything else is pretty low as I hate having to scroll thru really long directories etc.

So basically what you're saying is that the guy is a moron and they can make the inode limit less restrictive.

bump for more info..

Reading some shit in google groups it appears many people talk of an inode limit of 65000. No matter how small the files. So most people break up the drive into several smaller drives and bypass this limit.

Seems odd there would be such a limit in the first place. I have millions of files on my Windows drive... Is this a *nix issue?

Just did some reading myself. It looks like on Unix systems you can set disk usage limit (total space used) as well as an "inode" limit which appears to equate to the number of files. My host has increased the inode limit.. I found the command "df -i" which will report the inode info.. So on that server they've got it set to 500k now and I'm using about 98k.. checking another server, the "home" drive is set at over 1.6M inodes and I'm using about 150k. Interesting stuff. Really should learn more about the unix type OSs.