maximum number of files in a directory

[Gregory Locke]

Hi All:

Does anyone happen to know the maximum number of files that can be stored in a single directory. My system is a Itanium x6600 running HP-UX 11.23 w/ 16gb ram.

Thank you.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Gregory:

There is no practical limit to the number of inodes that a VxFS filesystem can allocate as long as 'largefiles' is enabled for it.

The issue really is performance. The more files in a directory (and a filesystem's mountpoint is that too), the slower it will be to search the directory. This includes not only running utilities like 'find' but in simply attempting to execute something that lives in a directory with many, many other files.

Regards!

...JRF...

[David Bellamy]

Gregory that depends on a lot of things
1. what size is the directory
2. what size is the files.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

There is essentially no limit as the limit is ultimately the size of the filesystem (or the number of inodes if the filesystem was created with a fixed number of inodes rather than the default method of dynamically expanding the number of inodes). Having said this, if you are asking this question then almost certainly you are considering a very bad design because you are going to see long search times in directories. While the file system can handle millions of files per directory that doesn't mean that this is a wise use of a file system. Generally, this approach is used as a very poor substitute for a database.

[Gregory Locke]

Hi All:

It is a 10gb partition. The files are output from a program. The bulk of the files are 0kb in size, just pointers. The others average about 4mg in size. A new directory is created for each month's output. The directory for this month so far is over 40000 files.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again) Gregory:

It's not the SIZE of the files, it's the NUMBER of them that matter. Searching a directory becomes slower as the number of elements therein becomes larger.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Gregory Locke]

Thanks all!

[Dennis Handly]

As mentioned by others, you may want a directory for each day's output. That would take it down to ~1000 per directory.
Just create a subdirectory for each day.