Quarantine problem: Ext3 directory limit to 32000 files

[Jules Field]

On 09/08/2010 18:31, Desai, Jason wrote:
>>>> Especially since this guy quarantines more than 32,000 mail per day.
>>>> To delete "old" stuff then is making the users have less than a day to
>>>> retrieve their blocked mail. That's poor service.
>>>>
>>>> His own suggestion of creating hourly catalogs sounded good to me.
>>>>
>>>>          
>>> Also keep in mind that 32000 files in a directory will be less efficient
>>> to work through.
>>>
>>> Hugo.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>        
>>      
> Are you sure there is a limit of 32,000 files in a directory?  I think there is a limit of 32,000 subdirectories.  I'm not sure about 32,000 files though.
>    
The limit is actually 32,000 links to any inode. And I have hit it too. 
It just hasn't caused me a major problem yet.
Unfortunately counting the number of entries in a directory is a slow 
operation (effectively equivalent to an unsorted "ls") so I don't want 
to do it every time I write a file. Which is why I haven't addressed it 
before.

Can you think of any *fast* ways of overcoming this limit? Other 
filesystems such as xfs handle a million or so files in a dir without 
breaking a sweat, it's just a severe limitation of ext3 :-(

Jules

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