Quarantine problem: Ext3 directory limit to 32000 files

[Lew Wolfgang]

  On 08/09/2010 03:32 PM, Jules Field wrote:
> 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 :-(

We switched many years ago, first to Reiserfs and then to XFS, and haven't
looked back since.  Support for both comes out-of-the-box with SuSE
distributions, but I don't know about the others.  We even use XFS as
the standard filesystem for desktops these days.

Regards,
Lew Wolfgang