How many files can I stored in a linux folder?(Amazon EC2)

Question

On Linux systems (Amazon EC2), what is the maximum number of files that can be stored in one directory without slowing down performance? (I know too many files in one directory on Windows systems will cause the system to operate slowly.)

Answer 1

Personally, I would keep the count under 30 000 to make sure I wouldn't have to worry about performance problems with any versions of ls or similar tools.

From a great answer on SO, here's the number of files you are able to keep, depending on your chosen file system (ext3 is default on Amazon Linux I think).

FAT32:

• Maximum number of files: 268,435,437
• Maximum file size: 4GB
• maximum number of files per directory: 65535

NTFS:

• Maximum number of files: 4,294,967,295
• Maximum file size: 16TB currently (16EB theoretically)

Ext2:

• Maximum number of files: 10¹⁸
• Maximum file size: 2TB
• theoretical file per directory limit: 1.3 × 10²⁰ files

Ext3:

• Maximum number of files: number of bytes in volume/2¹³.
• Maximum file size: 16GB (1KB block) to 2TB (4KB block)

Also, see this on performance problems with ls when using large directories.