[thelist] Images on webserver

Paul Cowan evolt at funkwit.com
Wed May 18 06:07:15 CDT 2005


> Assuming that the images are accessed randomly, is there a speed
> advantage to storing the images in hundreds or thousands of subfolders
> and subsubfolders--thereby limiting the number of images in any one
> folder--versus putting all the images in one folder.

There will definitely be speed advantages on the maintenance side. I can't 
speak for the accessing side -- though knowing what I know about 
filesystems, I suspect the difference will be negligible on that side. The 
first time you try to browse on the network to (or, worse, FTP to) a single 
folder with a million images in it, though, I can assure you you'll regret 
it. Word to the wise is all!

You mentioned that the image names will be numeric... you can always have a 
tree, grouping say by 1000s.

/images
/images/0/
/images/0/000/
/images/0/000/001.jpg
/images/0/000/002.jpg

So image 1703122 would be /images/1/703/122.jpg -- that way there's never 
more than 1000 files/subfolders in a given folder (and, frankly, even 1000 
can be very cumbersome).

Cheers,

Paul


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