On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 01:04:37PM -0400, Bob Hoffman wrote:
If you have 300,000 clients you could give them their own folder each and then the folders would have only 10 photos, but one folder would contain 300,000 folders.
No. Because that top level folder would be split by first letter, or by first and second letter eg "fred" would be f/r/fred (or f/r/ed) "harry" would be h/a/harry (or h/a/rry)
If you find there's too much clumping then (eg you have a lot of people beginning "fr"), you hash the name instead, and then split on the hash. (A simple hash could just be an incrementing number - "userid").
Then you simply program the web server to automatically convert from friendly name to split (or split hash'd) name. So it _looks_ like everyone has names like "fred" and "harry" but your directory structure is a lot more efficient.
SO what is best for file management and system resources?
Best is subjective. I've just described _one_ method.