Even if there seem to exist a few duplicate questions, I think this one is unique. I'm not asking if there are any limits, it's only about performance drawbacks in context of Apache. Or unix file system in general.
Lets say if I request a file from an Apache server
http://example.com/media/example.jpg
does it matter how many files there are in the same directory "media"?
The reason I'm asking is that my PHP application generates images on the fly.
Once created, it places it at the same location the PHP script would trigger due to ModRewrite. If the file exists, Apache will skip the whole PHP execution and directly serve the static image instead. Some kind of gateway cache if you want to call it that way.
Apache has basically two things to do:
- Check if the file exists
- Serve the file or forward the request to PHP
Till now, I have about 25.000 files with about 8 GB in this single directory. I expect it to grow at least 10 times in the next years.
While I don't face any issues managing these files, I have the slight feeling that it keeps getting slower when requesting them via HTTP. So I wondered if this is really what happens or if it's just my subjective impression.
