> How does performance suffer from scanning a directory with millions of files, or if they're spread across multiple directories, from traversing the directories? Even if the delivery and user agents handle it well, what about the command line tools that would make one-file-per-message appealing? What if it's a network filesystem?
General purpose file systems can manage several thousand per directory; splitting up into directories is probably a good thing (I archive mine per year). Walking the extra directories adds negligible overhead, since all but the leaf directories will have a very small number of entries. To go from one million to ten thousand files per directory you only have to add a single level of 100 directories.
General purpose file systems can manage several thousand per directory; splitting up into directories is probably a good thing (I archive mine per year). Walking the extra directories adds negligible overhead, since all but the leaf directories will have a very small number of entries. To go from one million to ten thousand files per directory you only have to add a single level of 100 directories.