> Hi > > I need to store about 250.000.000 files. Files are less than 4k. > > On a ext4 (fedora 14) the system crawl at 10.000.000 in the same > directory. > > I tried to create hash directories, two level of 4096 dir = 16.000.000 > but I had to stop the script to create these dir after hours > and "rm -rf" would have taken days ! mkfs was my friend > > I tried two levels, first of 4096 dir, second of 64 dir. The creation > of the hash dir took "only" few minutes, > but copying 10000 files make my HD scream for 120s ! I take only 10s > when working in the same directory. > > The filenames are all 27 chars and the first chars can be used to hash > the files. > > My question is : Which filesystem and how to store these files ? Did you try XFS? Deletes may be slow but apart from that it did a nice jobs when I last used it. But we had only around 50.000.000 files at the time. However, also ext3 worked quite well after *removing* dir_index. Also, did you run a x86_64 kernel? We were having all kind of troubles with big boxes and i686-PAE kernel, because direntry and inode caches were very small. Simon