Thus I need to use filename globbing, which on a few thousand files takes some time.

This may or may not be an option to you, but consider making your directory structure heirarchical, instead of flat.

Flat directories over 1K files tend to get unreasonably slow, at least in my Linux/Solaris experience.

Incidentally, anybody ever run performance numbers comparing readdir to glob? Is either faster?

Peace,
-McD