How many files can I put in a directory?

Question

Does it matter how many files I keep in a single directory? If so, how many files in a directory is too many, and what are the impacts of having too many files? (This is on

Answer 1

FAT32:

• Maximum number of files: 268,173,300
• Maximum number of files per directory: 2¹⁶ - 1 (65,535)
• Maximum file size: 2 GiB - 1 without LFS, 4 GiB - 1 with

NTFS:

• Maximum number of files: 2³² - 1 (4,294,967,295)
• Maximum file size
  • Implementation: 2⁴⁴ - 2⁶ bytes (16 TiB - 64 KiB)
  • Theoretical: 2⁶⁴ - 2⁶ bytes (16 EiB - 64 KiB)
• Maximum volume size
  • Implementation: 2³² - 1 clusters (256 TiB - 64 KiB)
  • Theoretical: 2⁶⁴ - 1 clusters (1 YiB - 64 KiB)

ext2:

• Maximum number of files: 10¹⁸
• Maximum number of files per directory: ~1.3 × 10²⁰ (performance issues past 10,000)
• Maximum file size
  • 16 GiB (block size of 1 KiB)
  • 256 GiB (block size of 2 KiB)
  • 2 TiB (block size of 4 KiB)
  • 2 TiB (block size of 8 KiB)
• Maximum volume size
  • 4 TiB (block size of 1 KiB)
  • 8 TiB (block size of 2 KiB)
  • 16 TiB (block size of 4 KiB)
  • 32 TiB (block size of 8 KiB)

ext3:

• Maximum number of files: min(volumeSize / 2¹³, numberOfBlocks)
• Maximum file size: same as ext2
• Maximum volume size: same as ext2

ext4:

• Maximum number of files: 2³² - 1 (4,294,967,295)
• Maximum number of files per directory: unlimited
• Maximum file size: 2⁴⁴ - 1 bytes (16 TiB - 1)
• Maximum volume size: 2⁴⁸ - 1 bytes (256 TiB - 1)