Hello, just wondering, if you read a directory with, lets say 500,000+ files.....what happens? Will it take forever

How long it takes depends somewhat on the filesystem. If it's smbfs, for instance, it'll take longer than you like. One thing you could do to make it more efficient is to put each user's files in their own directory, so that you'd have bobby/2006-05-08.txt instead of bobby2006-05-08.txt. However, if looking for the latest file for a certain user is a frequent operation, then you should do as davido suggests and keep track of that explicitely. (You may not need a database for that, though; for instance, you could just have the uploader make susan-latest.txt a symlink to susan's last uploaded file. If the filesystem you are using does not support symbolic links, then you could just store the filename of george's latest file in george-latest-upload-filename.txt or somesuch.)