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I am taking over the hosting of a poorly written application (I am not paid for this) and I am wondering which filesystem would serve best a hundred thousand images totaling some 900GB in a single directory. As this server is chiefly my development server, there is plenty of spare CPU power (it's an E3-1275V2 idle most of the time) and RAM (about 20-27 GB free), these are not considerations.

The files never change. Maybe they are deleted rarely but most definitely they are not changed.

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    This is just my opinion, but I'd go with xfs as it was originally designed for this workload. Second choice is zfs but I've never done any production work with this filesystem. Commented Nov 23, 2018 at 15:17
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    I don't think the fs will matter much in this case. What matters is how the application handles the directory. Commented Nov 23, 2018 at 15:31
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    I would divide up the image files into one or two layers of subdirectories, make the application access them at the new locations and then use whatever filesystem was default one. Commented Nov 23, 2018 at 15:39
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    And note that applications that try something to do with the file names (like ls, which will attempt to sort them) still present problems, even if the file system handles it well. Commented Nov 23, 2018 at 16:13

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In generally xfs is developed to handle very large files with random access and many (millions) of files in single directory.

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  • The speed usually does not depend on the filesystem but rather on the efficience of the DNLC. Commented Nov 23, 2018 at 17:47
  • @schily I did not test such solution on really large scale setup, but IMHO this filesystem provide one of the best balances and speed. Commented Nov 23, 2018 at 17:59
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    Well let's say it claims this feature, but since it is not available on Solaris or FreeBSD, you cannot compare it with ZFS and for this reason such a claim does not really help. Commented Nov 23, 2018 at 18:01

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