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. -- rgds Stephen