I just found this in another forum. I sure would be helpful to know an
exact number if anyone knows. (ext3 is basically the same ext2)

"There is a limit of 32k
(32768) subdirectories in a single directory, a limitation likely of
only academic interest, as many people don't even have that many files
(though huge mail servers may need to keep that in mind).  The ext2
inode specification allows for over 100 trillion files to reside in a
single directory, however because of the current linked-list directory
implementation, only about 10-15 thousand files can realistically be
stored in a single directory.  This is why systems such as Squid (
http://www.squid-cache.org ) use cache directories with many
subdirectories - searching through tens of thousands of files in one
directory is sloooooooow.  There is however a hashed directory index
scheme under development which should allow up to about 1 million
files to be reasonably stored in a single directory."

:

-- 
Tom Penney

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