Kenneth, I have a system that tracks signatures and we get thousands of signatures every day. We started storing these several years ago and we were originally storing all images in one place. Our first attempt we stored the .png files as Image fields with the store outside the datafile setting on. It was so easy to setup and we were off to the races but then we ran into problem. Next we tried storing all of the images into one OS folder. Once we got up over about 25k signature .png files in a directory we starting seeing problems. The main problem here is if you ever need to browse to the directory manually and try and find/fix something the OS freezes for some time. It gets worse as the number of files grow. We currently have about 10 million signature images stored and we break it down by several groupings per day now with a few thousand images per directory. This has solved the majority of our problems.
Regarding storing in the datafile (externally stored)....don't do it if you have a high volume of documents. Here's a few of the problems I have had with this method. 1. Backup takes much longer to backup your data as it also has to backup all of your documents stored externally 2. Your 4D backups can get HUGE 3. Restoring your backup takes much much longer because it has to write out all of the externally stored documents to disk. This really really hurt one day when our server crashed and the restore took several hours vs. about 25 minutes since removing the images. Our datafile is about 70gb of data not counting our signature images. 4. If something happens and you get a corrupt document on disk or a corrupt directory 4D's compact/verify freaks out because it can't access an externally stored document it wants. You then have to essentially loop through the datafile and attempt to load each document that is stored on disk and see if you get an error and if you do re-save the record with the document removed from the record. Without this your compact/verify fails. I highly recommend segmenting out your documents into smaller chunks of up to a few thousand files per directory. I also recommend using something like Amazon S3 with geo redundant storage for storage and backup of those documents. It's more work upfront but can make your life much easier over the long run. The 4D Method user group had a presentation on using AWS a couple years ago that can help get you on the right track there. Thanks Justin ********************************************************************** 4D Internet Users Group (4D iNUG) FAQ: http://lists.4d.com/faqnug.html Archive: http://lists.4d.com/archives.html Options: http://lists.4d.com/mailman/options/4d_tech Unsub: mailto:[email protected] **********************************************************************
