RE: Huge number of files in a directory

The issue with 'ls' is that it wants to sort the output. You may want to
try using "-f", which says "do not sort"

In any case, huge numbers of files mean longer times to look through the
directory nodes to find the file. And "huge" will depend on your system.
One approach that I've used is to create a directory structure based on
the filename; for example "abcdefgh.dat" might be stored as
"a/b/c/d/abcdefgh.dat". This preserves the filename, but keeps each
directory to a managable size.

Another, possibly more appropriate answer, would be to automagically
create dated directories, and have the system write them into there each
day. For example, at midnight, you could have a script that made a
directory for 20091007, then rm today;ln -s 20091007 today.

Then you'd only have to move all of that, for which find would be the
right answer, I think.

mark
________________________________________
From: redhat-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx [redhat-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of "Fábio Jr." [fjuniorlista@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, October 07, 2009 16:48
To: General Red Hat Linux discussion list
Subject: Re: Huge number of files in a directory

Thanks Andrew for the reply

Actually, the 'ls' in the directory isn't work, takes too much time and
blow the load up high. The number of files is a projection based in the
size of the directory, with the avg size of the files, that dont vary
too much.

I have 2 SAS disk in RAID 1. Before this, all the data was in a single
disk without RAID. When we make the migration to a powerfull server,
with the new disks, it took 4 days to finish all the transfer, and it
was performed about 1 year ago.

I didnt have a througput problem yet, not network, or even write or
read. But I'm concerned about when this will start to botter me. More
time I let to start to apply a solution, harder it will be to be
acomplished.

I'll realy make a deep research before start to work and migrate
anything. I just wanted t know if anyone has already have some similar
problem, to share experiences.

Thanks again.

[]s
Fábio Jr.

Andrew Elliott escreveu:
The limit of the number of files in a directory is variable and set when
the
FS is created. It depends on the size of the volume; if you do a 'df
-i' it
will tell you the available inodes you have. This will help to
determine
the limits of the fs which could help in determining where the
bottleneck
is.

Quantity?...I've had problems doing an 'ls -al' on a single directory
with
45000 files in it (EXT3 on external scsi array)...so I'm surprised that
you're not having problems already...

Suggestions? I've read that XFS and ReiserFS are the best fs types for
working with a large amount of small files, although the article was old
(2006). Reiser will consume more CPU than the others, but that's just
from
my personal experience.

If you do find the number of files is a bottleneck, hardware is the
easiest
fix. I'd recommend getting the fastest drives and bus that you can
afford...

I would definitely research the issue before doing anything about it...

Andrew.



-------
Hello,

I serve static content with an Apache server, and store the files in a
storage server, wich is mounted in the webserver via NFS. 95% of the
files that I serve are images, and the format of the file name is
{number}.png.

I have these images all together in a single directory, and there was
about 4 million files in this folder.

I wanto to change this directory structure to something more secure and
dynamic, to permit an easier way to scale and backup these files.

My questions are:

- When the quantity of files will start to become a bottleneck for my
filesystem? ( they are stored in partition with ext3)

- When the quantity of files will start to become a bottleneck for my
OS?

- Suggestions?

Thanks

[]s
Fábio Jr.



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