2011/7/24 yonatan pingle yonatan.pingle@gmail.com:
Hello, I have a rather annoying issue on going with one of my centos virtual servers. the server hosts a website using apache and mysql ,there are three persons involved with keeping the site up and running. and i am his root due to the fact he does not know anything with about Linux. there is an php/sql coder , and the site owner which only knows to use the CMS and upload new articles to the website.
the coder and the site owner work together for a long time already , i am their new admin ( as the last one was a major ISP which failed to host the site properly ).
lately the server is under-preforming and load averages are high, mysql service keeps crashing and the server is hitting max memory usage ( so i added ram .. ) , after looking into the website folders, i have found one folder which from my point of view is one of the causes for the server loads.
(sorry for piping ls ).
uploads]# ls | wc -l 3123
I have talked with the site owner, which in turn showed this to the coder ,now he throws the ball back claiming: it has nothing to do with server performance. the folder is full of images, about 40K each, and i have good reason to believe this is the problem, as this is not the first time i see that a folder which includes a large amount of files causes a server to under-perform.
the coder is not tech savvy as one might expect, so it's really hard for me to explain the issue of having lots of files in one folder to the site owner or to the coder.
the hardware is a decent machine dual E5530 24RAM with six hard drives in raid. the virtual server has 2GB of ram and it's own CPU share ( 4 cores 8 threads ). the coder is arguing with facts sadly to say he has the site owner on "his side".
long story short, how should i explain in the most simple way in plain english that having that much files in a folder will cause a server to work slower?
pros vs cons of having a large amount of small files in the same folder on Linux Centos?
I assume that you are using ext3 or ext4 filesystems? Both ext3 and ext4 slows down, if there is too much files in same directory. XFS-fs is solution to fix this problem.
-- Eero