Re: File limit inside a single directory

[Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>]

On 2/13/15 10:49 AM, suntrop@web.de wrote:
> Thanks guys. I was afraid of having a couple 100K (at most). The
> server support team told me not to have more than 10 to 20K. There
> seems to be a misconception (for me and people from the CMS) about
> the 32K subdirectory limit, but this ins't for files/folders within a
> single directory but rather nested directories like /1/2/3.../32000

You've confused things a bit here, FWIW.

The 32k (well, 32000 because, sure) limit on ext3 is max link count;
each subdirectory increases the link count on its parent, but only
its parent.  It's not about deep nesting, or about files in a dir.
It's only about subdirs in a parent dir.

# mkdir dir
# stat dir | grep Links
Device: fd06h/64774d    Inode: 2490391     Links: 2	// . and .. entries
# mkdir dir/subdir1 dir/subdir2 dir/subdir3
# stat dir | grep Links
Device: fd06h/64774d    Inode: 2490391     Links: 5
# mkdir dir/subdir1/subsubdir1 dir/subdir1/subsubdir2 dir/subdir1/subsubdir3
# stat dir | grep Links
Device: fd06h/64774d    Inode: 2490391     Links: 5

ext4 bumped that max to 64000, and just stops counting if that number
gets exceeded...

-Eric