Re: OK to have many files in one folder?

Thanks for the replies but I'm not sure I know what to do with them. Is the problem with the number of files, or is the problem with the activity? Can you dumb down your answers at all for me? :) On Jun 15, 2007, at 11:51 AM, Daniel Brown wrote:

6/15/07, Jay Blanchard <jblanchard@pocket.com> wrote:

[snip] Server is running Linux, and PHP is constantly creating and modifying images in a directory. Apache is constantly serving these same images. There are about 250,000 of them in the same directory. Seems to be running OK, no problematic CPU load, but I'm wondering if anyone knows whether I'm living dangerously having that many docs in one directory with that much activity. It is an extremely busy server. Sorry is this seems like more of a linux sysad question than a PHP question. Thanks... :) [/snip] Two words. Beware the inode. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php

If that directory is all on one single partition, God help you if there's any corruption. Check into RAID 0+1/RAID 5 disk striping if you've got that many images. And remember, the fact that they're all in one directory doesn't matter at all to the system, as directories, folders, et cetera, are just representations for human readability and organization. In fact, those files reside on several sectors throughout the drive, and each file itself is probably fragmented many times. Just for fun, though, if you want to crash your server, you could always do:

       while [ 1 = 1 ]; do ls -l;done

--Daniel P. Brown [office] (570-) 587-7080 Ext. 272 [mobile] (570-) 766-8107 --PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php