: How many files can I stored in a linux folder?(Amazon EC2) On Linux systems (Amazon EC2), what is the maximum number of files that can be stored in one directory without slowing down performance?

@Moriarity557

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.

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