Here's the results from a single logical (SAN) drive on one of our file servers:
Total Files Listed:
4661023 File(s) 681,427,607,680 bytes
On this logical drive are our primary shares for users and shared data, but if
no single folder has more than 2000 files does it matter? I'm thinking still
yes.
And yes, it takes FOREVER to do any kid of file maintenance on this.
Dave
From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2011 8:57 AM
To: NT System Admin Issues
Subject: RE: # of files on Windows server
Consider this: NTFS is a type of database. And not a very efficient one either.
And, for very small files, the files are actually stored within the file
system, while with larger files, NTFS has pointers to the actual file data
stored in the FS.
Storage size has exploded in the last 10 years. However, performance has not
matched the size expansion.
If I'm going to simply OPEN or CREATE a small file - number of files has little
impact. NTFS is just going to create a new entry in the database.
If I need to find, list, or extend a file - well, it's going to take longer.
If I need to enumerate files (that is, get a directory listing) the more files
I've got, the longer it's going to take.
It "can be shown" that having more than about 1K files in a directory will
effect enumeration. It becomes really noticeable (IMHO) around 10K and heads
rapidly downhill after that.
Regards,
Michael B. Smith
Consultant and Exchange MVP
http://TheEssentialExchange.com
From: David Lum [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2011 11:46 AM
To: NT System Admin Issues
Subject: # of files on Windows server
Recently we had a thread about how many files get to be too many for reasonable
performance. Would this be just per folder, or possibly logical drive in
general? Links/documents would work too.
David Lum
Systems Engineer // NWEATM
Office 503.548.5229 // Cell (voice/text) 503.267.9764
~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~
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