I've got a virtualized Win2k3 R2 fully patched server on ESX 3.5 - the
OS partition is on the ESX box.

The data drives are spread across 4 SAN LUNs, (3 Lefthand units with
two-way replication and I'm running out of space) holding ,  6,265,927
files at 3,493,033,902,080 bytes. I haven't stopped to count the
number of directories, but none of them hold anywhere near 10k files.

A full backup of all LUNS takes from Friday 8PM until Tuesday AM - or
later. Tapes go out the door on Wednesday.

I'm looking for a better solution too.

Kurt

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 10:15, David Lum <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
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