[RESOLVED] Folder Limits

[brendan2b]

Hi,

Is there a max num of files that a folder can hold. I have heard on windows machines there are, but wasn't sure about linux.

I am trying to store a bunch of pictures on a site that users upload, and if I get a lot of pictures I want to make sure everything runs smoothly and users dont get errors if a folder gets too big.

Maybe im wrong and there are no limits, should I still think hard about creating a good image storing structure?

I am thinking on creating 30 folders in my images directory numbered 0,1,2,3,4,5,6 respectively until I have 30 of them.

What i was going to do then was take the userid of the user that uploaded the image and mod it by 30, and whatever the remainder was, dump the image in that folder. That way once i get over 30 users, the images from there on should be pretty evenly distributed (in theory) and all the images that belong to user 60 for example will be in folder 0.

Is there a better approach? Am I making it too complicated for just storing image?

Thanks.

[NogDog]

According to this, at least in Ubuntu Linux the default may be 32,000 files in a given directory. I won't bet the house and farm on that, though.

[Weedpacket]

It might be simpler for each user to have a distinct directory (create it for that user's first uploaded image). There's the risk of hundreds of thousands of users; so say that the images of user #652345 get stored in userimages/653/245 (mod 1000: recursively in case there are millions of users). Then there's still the risk that one user might upload hundreds of thousands of images(!)...

[brendan2b]

Excellent answers. Thank you.