Posted by Richard Davey on 06/29/05 19:39

Hello Ryan,

Wednesday, June 29, 2005, 5:22:30 PM, you wrote:

RA> Interesting, I just created a "album" kind of section for a
RA> clients site, but i am dumping all the images of all users into
RA> the folder "user_album_pics" he's on a dedicated linux server with
RA> 2gigs ram and 300gigs hdd space...

RA> Any rough estimates what number of images would be too much? and
RA> does anyone think i should make folders for each user? Each user
RA> is limited to max 3mb of pics though...

(Disclaimer: I am NOT a Unix expert, this is just what I've picked up
over the years, perhaps it doesn't even apply any more? Hopefully
someone else can follow this post up and clarify)

AFAIK each file is assigned an inode. Some filesystems have inode
limitations - meaning you can run out of them if you have too many
files on a partition. You can use "df -i" to show this information,
right not it's probably nothing to worry about - over time as a site
gains popularity it can be. You can run out of inodes before you run
out of disk space (depending on the average size of your files).

Creating extra partitions helps avoid this, as does using an "extent"
based filesystem. A filesystem with "journaling" also helps should the
server ever crash as it caches disk information and won't need to
spend ages doing a massive re-built when the server boots again, which
depending on the number of files can take hours. ReiserFS / XFS are
good alternative filesystems, but again refer to my original
disclaimer - there may be better options these days.

Best regards,

Richard Davey
--
http://www.launchcode.co.uk - PHP Development Services
"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." - Isaac Asimov

[Back to original message]