waling a directory with very many files

[Christian Heimes]

Andre Engels wrote:
> What kind of directories are those that just a list of files would
> result in a "very large" object? I don't think I have ever seen
> directories with more than a few thousand files...

I've seen directories with several hundreds of thousand files. Depending
on the file system and IO capacity it can take about one to several
minute until 'ls' even starts to print out files names. It's no fun on
directories on a CIFS storage or ext3 w/o a btree dir index.

Christian