I ran into a similar issue years ago on a NAS storage device. We were housing scanned optical images and the import software natively put 1,024 files into 1,024 folders - into another 1,024 folders, blah, blah, blah......
Until the device was so bogged down, it killed performance considerably, until a purge schedule was put into place. Don Guyer Windows Systems Engineer RIM Operations Engineering Distributed - A Team, Tier 2 Enterprise Technology Group Fiserv [email protected] Office: 1-800-523-7282 x 1673 Fax: 610-233-0404 www.fiserv.com <http://www.fiserv.com/> From: David Lum [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2011 1:16 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: # of files on Windows server, is 4 million too many? 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! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
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