Re: Question: Maximum number of directories?

["Miquel van Smoorenburg" <miquels@cistron.nl>]

In article <[🔎] 009301c5f9f1$b4654f20$6400a8c0@slocal>,
Gerorge Reece-Howe <molehill@optushome.com.au> wrote:
>> "Jochen Schulz" <ml@well-adjusted.de>
>
>>You can see that / and /srv are ext3 and /var and /home are xfs. I
>>chose xfs for these because they contain directories with a lot of
>>files (the already mentioned Maildirs and a news spool). So far, I had
>>no problems with xfs.
>
>I'll see how I go with ext3 for now, but I'll keep that in mind.

Ext2 and ext3 get really slow when you have lots of files (or
subdirectories) in one directory.

However that was fixed some time ago. If you're running 2.6 you
can enable the dir_index on an ext3 filesystem. See man mkfs.ext3:

       -O feature[,...]
              Create  filesystem  with  given  features  (filesystem options)

                   dir_index
                          Use  hashed  b-trees  to  speed  up lookups in large
                          directories.


You can enable this on existing filesystems using tune2fs. See man
tune2fs(8) for more information.

Mike.