millions of directories in www folder

[nagasea]

Hi I'm planning to give user a free personalized url

something like this: www.mydomain.com/XXXX (xxxx is your choice)

And inside that XXX folder is a redirection page to whatever the user choose.

My question here, what happen if the site getting bigger and I have millions of folder in the www folder.
Do you think this will slow down the server performance?
Is there anyway to do this?

And another question.
What is the pros and cons putting tons of image files in just 1 folder?

[dougal85]

I would suggest that websites you see that appear to do this are only pretending.

Most cases will use something like mod_rewrite

It could for example could make the following url look nicer

http://www.domain.com/userpage.php?userid=dougal85

for example it could look like;

http://www.domain.com/dougal85

So google mod_rewrite 😉