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Asked: 2026-06-04T21:40:41+00:00

I’m intending to use files to store data as a kind of cache for

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I’m intending to use files to store data as a kind of cache for PHP-generated files, so as to avoid having to re-generate them every time they are loaded (their contents only change once a day).

One thing I have noticed in the past is that if a directory has a large number of files inside, reaching the thousands, it will take a long time for an FTP program to load its contents, sometimes even crashing the computer that’s trying to load them. So I’m looking into a tree-based system, where each file is stored in a subfolder based on its ID. So for example a file with the ID 123456 would be stored as 12/34/56.html. In this way, each folder will have at most 100 items (except in the event that there are millions of files, but that is extremely unlikely to happen).

Is this a good idea, is it overkill, or is it unnecessary? The question essentially boils down to: “What is the best way to organise a large number of files?”

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    1) The answer depends on

    • OS (e.g. Linux vs Windows) and

    • filesystem (e.g. ext3 vs NTFS).

    2) Keep in mind that when you arbitrarily create a new subdirectory, you’re using more inodes

    3) Linux usually handles “many files/directory” better than Windows

    4) A couple of additional links (assuming you’re on Linux):

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