2011/7/24 yonatan pingle <yonatan.pingle at 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